There Was Someone Standing in My Yard (Part 2)

Series by: donutboy456781

Thank you to everyone who expressed their concern for my wife and I. Between all of your kind words and the kindness of the police, it’s nice knowing we aren’t alone through all this craziness. Fortunately, our night was mostly uneventful after all the bizarre discoveries from the previous day. At least one police car stayed parked in the front of our house from sundown until sunup just as was promised, and there were no signs of the mysterious individual through the whole night. I know it’s quite possible he could have been present somewhere else, but you take solace in the little victories when you can get them. At 2ish, I heard the policemen moving around in the driveway. In the morning, they told me they thought they saw the person standing in the driveway, but by the time they investigated the driveway and the wooded area near it, there was no sign of the trespasser.

I also appreciate hearing all your suggestions in the comments about how to get through these times of trouble. I’m not a superstitious man, but I definitely cant rule anything you suggested out at this point. After doing some research about wendigos and skinwalkers, I can say I’m thoroughly terrified by the similarities our visitor had with both of them. I sure as hell hope that our guest wasn’t either of those things, otherwise this all seems pretty hopeless.

Also, I actually do own a shotgun. I‘ve never used it for anything other than skeet-shooting, but having it definitely makes me feel a little safer... I’ll be sure to keep it locked, loaded, and by my side until everything is resolved.

Anyways, there have been some developments since last night, which I will share with you all now. For starters, I’ve decided not to tell Mary about the fact that our guest is a recurring visitor to our property. I told her that the police stayed out front all night as a favor to us rather than their fear that we’re dealing with something a lot more malicious than just a one-time trespasser. Plus, I’m worried that this might bring back some bad memories for her. She had an issue with a stalker when she was in college, and it persisted for nearly a year before she was able to get a restraining order on him. Even though she hasn’t seen this person since, she’s still very much disturbed by that painful experience eight years later. I spent most of last night trying to convince her to make the trip to stay at her sister’s, but she refuses to leave me alone despite how unsafe our house now is. I’m walking on eggshells here, so while withholding the truth from her feels dirty... I think it’s better than the alternative if she’s sticking here with me.

I also made a trip to town around 9 o’clock this morning to make a few purchases that should let any upcoming nights feel a little safer. The most important purchase: 15 lights that are much stronger than the ones we‘ve had dotting our property since we moved in. These new lights are set on a timer, so I plan to illuminate just about every inch of property starting tonight.

I also made a stop to my friend Andrew’s house after my shopping spree. He’s on the road for work right now, but since he’s been an avid hunter his whole life I knew he had something that could REALLY up my surveillance factor: Game cameras. If you’re not familiar, game cameras are cameras used mostly by hunters that are most often triggered by ether sound or motion. Andrew’s three game cameras were older and were only able to take still frames when triggered, but I think it’s important to monitor the woods surrounding my house as well as my property. The more information I can gather on this... person(?), the better chance we have of getting our life back to normal.

After making these stops, I got back home around noon to both set up for another tense night and to continue find answers on who it was visiting our house.

It took an hour, but I readjusted all four cameras. I’m not very handy at all, and the three I had to unscrew and remount kept falling no matter how much I tried to screw them into place, but thanks to my effort I have a much better view of the entirety of the area surrounding my house. I really don’t think I’ll see much on the two cameras in the fenced in parts of our property out back, as the back fence is tall and all that can be seen behind the fence on camera are the dense trees, but you never know what could happen. What feels much more useful now is the driveway camera, which finally actually shows every inch of the driveway. Since the cops may have seen a figure in the driveway, I wouldn’t be shocked if I now caught this trespasser thanks to this new angle as well. I also picked three spots in the woods to set up Andrew’s motion activated game cameras as well. Since these cameras are older technology, I won’t be able to see the stills they take until I retrieve them and download their images the next morning.

Whelp, it’s a little after 4 PM as I’m writing this and I want to look through the older logs of the camera again. I’d like to go back to earliest recordings from when Mrs. Maddox was still living here to see if I could find any evidence of the trespasser showing up all those years ago as well. I doubt it though, since Jason or Mrs. Maddox herself would have noticed if they checked the cameras regularly like the claimed, but I figure it pays to check. I’ll post any updates if I find anything of note.

UPDATE: Yeah... he’s in the videos from eight years ago. I looked through the first three nights recorded by the camera, and so far this bastard has shown up in the front yard each night. He hasn’t done anything different in these videos though. Obviously this is an important finding, since it proves that the Maddox family might know something, but it doesn’t really teach me anything more about who or what I’m dealing with. I’m going to call Jason and see if I could talk to his mom now. She was so high-strung, she had to have noticed this person at some point.

Update 2: Called Jason, turns out his mom died earlier this year. I don’t know the Maddox family personally, so obviously I really didn’t keep in touch with them. I hope she found peace.

I asked Jason if he ever noticed anything on the security cameras and... he told me he never even checked them. When I explained that I saw someone standing outside in the video logs, he was speechless for a few minutes. I think he felt guilty. He admitted he had always brushed off his mother’s scared pleas to leave the house as her mind finally slipping during the final years of her life. He said he was hesitant to have her move in with his family full time, so he gave her a cell phone in case she ever fell down or needed any help and also told her he would install the cameras and check them nightly to be sure there was no one outside or in case anyone ever tried to break in. Clearly he was at fault for not believing his mom, but that’s not my problem. I asked him if she ever said anything about anyone coming to the house in the middle of the night, to which he replied that she would sometimes see a “tall man” standing somewhere in the front yard. Since she only started mentioning it the last couple months before she moved out, he assumed she was just seeing things and, as such, decided to move her into his house instead of investigating.

He also mentioned another incident that makes me very nervous the more I think about it. One night in August, about a month before we bought the house, he received a frantic call from his mom that there were people talking in the basement. Jason got there as fast as he could, but when he got there he only found his mother cowering in the living room. He saw no evidence that anyone broken in.

I told him not to worry or feel guilty, and I even lied to him and told him that the man had only showed up on surveillance cameras once while his mom lived there from what I could tell, and that he shouldn’t feel badly. I’m not sure if he believed me, but he seemed relieved.

It sounds like Mrs. Maddox was clearly of more sound-mind than was initially believed during her time living alone in this house. That left me with another disturbing but logical question: did I have to worry about the voices she heard in the basement? Thankfully I’ve never dealt with anything like that, but now I’m worried there might be someone or something else lurking INSIDE THE WALLS OF OUR HOME and not just out in our yard.

Mary’s here, so I’m just going to focus on keeping her calm. I’ll make some more updates if need be, but tonight will hopefully just be another quiet and uneventful night.

Update 3: Fuck. It’s almost 10:30 and the police officers still haven’t showed up to sit and watch our house like they did last night. I told Mary another fib to cover up the fact that we were still very much in danger. She’s in bed already sleeping, I told her I would be “catching up on the work I missed last night.” I’m actually holed up in the upstairs office, with a mini fridge full of energy drinks to my right and my trusty shotgun at the ready. I plan to stay glued to my laptop all night, watching the live feeds of the outside until the sun rises and I can feel safe again.

I’ve been watching this monitor for an hour now, and I think I’m finally noticing something... in the driveway. It’s just out of the light, crouched down near the woods but... it’s the trespasser. He’s completely motionless, but it’s definitely him. I think he’s been there for a while now but, but he just twitched slightly a couple times. I’m calling the police as I type this.

They’ve been alerted, and they’re on the way now. I know they’ll do their best, but... I probably won’t see them for another twenty minutes. I’ve got the gun on my lap now, I’m going to bring the gun and the laptop with me into the bedroom and lock the door. For Mary’s sake. Can’t be too safe.

In the minute I’ve taken my attention away from the screen to get fortified in the bedroom, he’s completely changed position. That little shadow on the edge of the woods is gone and now standing at the end of the front yard and almost on the road is the trespasser. His head is craned up towards the sky again. It’s almost like he’s staring at the camera... staring at me... it’s quiet. Eerie. I know we live in a secluded area but

He just sprinted towards the house. He’s banging on the door

There Was Someone Standing in My Yard (Part 1)

Series by: donutboy456781

Last night started off pretty normal. Most of the downstairs lights were off when I got home, but that was to be expected. Mary doesn’t mean to do it, but she always seems to forget that her husband works the graveyard shift, meaning he will be coming home most nights when both she and the sun are fast asleep. It was nothing to be angry about though. I simply planned to bust her for her constant forgetfulness the next morning and nothing more.

Anyways, I hadn’t eaten anything in the last few hours, so rather than going straight up to bed like I always do I decided to pop a frozen pizza into the microwave, just to silence my growling stomach. That break of routine, as meaningless as it seemed at the time, is probably the only reason I am writing this post.

Once I opened the beeping microwave I saw that its clock read 2:49 AM. I almost regretted staying up to eat this pizza, and I truly could feel my eyelids getting heavier with each second. Rather than move to the table to eat, I ate right in front of the microwave. I or Mary could clean up any mess in the morning, I just wanted to get some food in me and get some rest before I had to follow the same tiring schedule all over again the next day.

From where I was eating, my front door was roughly 90 degrees to my left and only about 15 feet away. I could see my front door and the small window beside it if I was looking that way, but at that point I wasn’t focused on anything other than devouring my pizza.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the motion lights had just unexpectedly turned out. Other than being surprised, I didn’t pay much attention to it at that time. We live in a pretty wooded area and get animals moving around through our yard all the time. I was sure that whatever was out there was nothing of note, maybe a badger or something of the like. After a minute, the lights clicked back off. I assumed that whatever had triggered them must have been scared off immediately by the lights. I returned my focus to my pizza.

Once I was done eating, I dragged myself to the stairs with what little energy I had left in my body. To get to the stairs, you have to walk into the front entryway and pass by the front windows.

Without thinking, I took a look out of my front window and was immediately jolted awake as my heart pounded like it was going to leap out of my chest. Standing in my yard about 20 feet away from my door was a man. Well, the outline of what seemed to be a man. There are no streetlights on our street, so the only lights in our yard were the motion lights we installed when we moved in (which as I mentioned were off) and the dim light we keep on in the entryway radiating out the front windows to the yard. All I could see was this outline, with head craned upwards as if they were looking to the stars or something.

I didn’t really know what to do... it was a freaky sight to see, but we live in a small and secluded community. We know literally everyone that lives around us, and our neighbors are all very trustworthy people. I figured that this person was someone I knew...

...so I tapped on the window to get the person’s attention. Foolish, I know. Wasn’t really thinking clearly I guess. But anyway, I didn’t want to wake Mary so I tried to stay as quiet as possible. He didn’t budge. No reaction at all. I figured that whoever it was out there couldn’t hear me... so... I opened the door. Don’t get it twisted, I was scared beyond belief. But at the end of the day, I try to see the best in people. The figure in my yard hadn’t really done anything to warrant a phone call to the police, plus they usually take a good 10 minutes to answer a call out here. I hoped to resolve this quickly and cleanly.

As the door creaked open, I realized that the figure had changed slightly: he was now staring right at me. It was jarring, two seconds prior when looking out the window, he’d still been staring upwards. I couldn’t make out the finer points of his features yet, as the light from the house barely reached him, and I thought that made him all the more creepy.

The figure just slowly started to walk backwards towards the road while still facing me. As the person sped up slightly, the motion lights finally came back on. He wasn’t anyone I had ever seen before. He was relatively tall (6’4 maybe?) and crazy skinny, borderline emaciated really. He truly looked like he had never eaten anything a day in his life. And he was completely hairless. No eyebrows, no facial hair, and bald. I was speechless as this seemingly mute and sickly person just silently observed me, and I quickly realized that he was less terrifying when he was obscured by shadows...

He turned and ran away from me through my yard, across the road and into the woods on the other side of the road. I was frozen in fear. Neither fight nor flight kicked in for me. Had this person wanted to hurt me or Mary, he had his chance.... but he didn’t take it...

I locked the door and went upstairs not really sure of what to do... I couldn’t really have called the police once he was gone, could I? I mean this guy didn’t really do anything. Sure he was on private property, but I’m sure the police wouldn’t take it seriously. I figured it was useless, and that I’d rather keep my guard up in case this man came back tonight and worry about possibly phoning the police.

I got very little sleep. I was sure that every rustle of the leaves or every gust of wind was the trespasser returning. I finally shut my eyes at 6 AM when the sun started to rise but was up when I heard Mary shuffling to the shower at 8ish.

“Oh, good morning! Didn’t expect you to be up, aren’t you sleepy?”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t really sleep... tough night of work and all that... since I’m up, why don’t I make you some breakfast before you go to work?”

She smiled and nodded in appreciation. I wanted to tell her about the events from a few hours prior, but I knew it would freak her the fuck out. And why wouldn’t it? It was a terrifying turn of events. I don’t know. I thought maybe her favorite dish of bacon and eggs would make the news easier for her. Really dumb logic in hindsight, but I guess I was still experiencing a fear-induced shock...

“What are we going to do?” Mary was trying to be calm, but I knew by the fact that she ignored her breakfast after I explained the situation that she was freaked out. I told her there wasn’t much for us to do right now. We argued a little bit, and she made it clear that she really wanted to call the police. I still didn’t think it was a good idea. We had zero evidence to prove there was anyone there in our yard the previous night. Zilch. Or so I thought...

“What about those cameras that Mrs. Maddox installed? Didn’t you link them up to your laptop when we moved in or something?”

We moved in 5 years ago because, even though it was in the middle of nowhere, this house was actually a lot closer to both our jobs. And honestly we liked the privacy the community offered. We bought the house from Jason Maddox, whose mother was an old widower living there alone for a few years. She had been petrified of the neighborhood ever since the death of her husband. Her son sold the house on her behalf so that she could live with him, hopefully living out the final years of her life in peace with Jason and his wife and kids. Before she moved out, she had Jason install a few cameras outside her house just for to provide her a peace of mind. The things were cheap pieces of junk and Jason himself said they rarely looked at them, but it turns out they actually came in more handy than any of us could have imagined.

I shrugged. “I guess you’re the brains in this relationship after all, Mare. I’ll call the boys in blue and deal with them and the cameras before I head off for work. In the meantime, do me a favor and don’t get too upset about all of this.” That was easier said than done, but I actually think she was a lot calmer once I actually started to take her police suggestion seriously. I kissed her goodbye and got right to work on figuring things out.

I poured myself a coffee and got to work. I was half expecting the bastards not to work in their hour of need because of my half-decade of neglect, but thankfully I couldn’t have been more wrong. I opened the software, and after a fifteen-ish minutes of updates I finally saw a live feed of the four different cameras of my outside. The camera in the driveway was angled poorly to the point where you could only see a small sliver of the driveway and dense foliage, while the back and side cameras showed mostly foliage and the fenced in portion of our yard. Jason Maddox had unsurprisingly done a piss poor job setting up 75% of the cameras.

The front camera was a comparative Mecca for our home surveillance. From what I could tell from watching the live feed, this camera was angled perfectly to have captured our uninvited visitor. I went into the database and found last night’s camera feeds. Sure enough, at 2:54 AM, the man crept out from the shadows and into the our front yard. There it was: concrete, undeniable proof.

I called and alerted the police, and they took me very seriously once I told them I had a video evidence of the intruder. The operator said that two officers would be sent to my home to view last night’s video and file a police report. Alas, my relief was short lived. Something that the operator said made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. A logical and seemingly-mundane question with immense ramifications. Something both horrifying and entirely possible that I simply hadn’t thought of.

“Does this individual show up on the security cameras any other nights?”

All at once, I realized how entirely possible and downright terrifying this possibility was. I mean... how many times did I lay awake in bed and see the front lights click on at odd hours of the night? Like I said, it was a pretty regular occurrence for us. I immediately checked the feed from the night before I encountered the man face to face. I wasn’t sure when he might come, so I started at 9 PM. I played it at 2x speed and made it through the night without anything of note. Momentary relief. I went back one more night prior. At 12:36 AM, he creeps into the yard and triggers the front motion lights. I was stunned...

But it got even worse. He stayed there, motionless, in complete darkness, until just about 5 AM. He was so still for almost five hours that he didn’t even trigger the motion lights again until he turned around and left for the day. Think about that. While our motion lights aren’t very sensitive, I know for a fact that something as simple as a head jerk from a sneeze would set them off. This guy was essentially a statue for almost five hours.

As I’m writing this, I am shaken. The police arrived moments after I made my discovery. I told the two officers about this new development, and they were visibly uncomfortable. Sergeant James, the veteran between the two officers, would later tell me that he never saw anything like this in his almost 23 years on the job.

We went through 33 days-worth of video logs, and found that the man came to my home on 27 of those nights. Besides the night I interrupted him, his briefest stay lasted 22 minutes and 15 seconds (five days ago). His longest stay occurred early last week. He arrived at 11:57 PM and left at 6:13 AM. He always stands in a similar spot in the front yard, about 20 feet from the front door.

I called in sick for work tonight, because I can’t begin to describe how little I want Mary to be alone at this house when night falls. I’m terrified.

So are the cops, especially since they know they don’t have this person for much. So far all the evidence shows is trespassing and loitering on private property. If they were to catch him in the act and not find any reason to charge him with a more serious crime, he’d probably just get a fine or a brief stint in jail. They claim they’ll have patrol cars scouring the area tonight and one car stationed in front of my house all night, which makes me feel somewhat better. But their lack of answers and their obvious uneasiness about all this makes me extremely nervous.

That’s all I have for now. Mary comes home in an hour, and it will be dark soon. If anyone on here knows anything about this situation, or just has a theory or spots a detail I missed, please let me know in the comments. I will update you all when (or if) we learn more about this whole situation or if something of note occurs. Until then, let’s just hope we make it through the night tonight.

I Live In A Town That Doesn't Exist: Sunny Friends (Part 2)

Series By: deathfox919

Hello again all. I was going to post last night, but living a normal life is just too interesting to pass up on. I am here now, and that's what counts, I guess. I posted this a couple of days back and decided to split it into two stories because I figured it's a pretty long story. If you don't feel like reading that, then all you need to know is I went to a daycare with some friends back when I was a child and one random day in August five kids were murdered behind the daycare.

Anyways, on with the fun.

About a week after this, my mom and I decided to go check out the new Dollar General that had opened in the town just south of us. We happened to run into Riley and Carrie there with their dad as they had come down to check it out as well. While my mom and their dad talked about the gruesome tragedy that took place the daycare, as parents do about things that concern their kids, Riley and I said we should have a playdate since we weren’t gonna be going back to daycare anytime soon.

Eventually, we went and talked to our parents about it, begging to hang out sometime soon. Our parents caved (probably because they knew we were in public and they didn't want us to lose our shit) and agree to set up a playdate. Riley and Carrie were getting babysat by Geneva Tattler, whom my family knew well as she ran track with my sister. If their dad could clear it with Geneva, we could definitely have some quality time to play a shit ton of Mario Kart.

The day came where I went over to their house. I packed a bag filled with my DS and what seemed to be a thousand different games (even though we would end up playing Mario Kart and doing the little animation program that the DS came loaded with) and went over with my mom. After hurriedly saying hi to Geneva and Carrie, Riley and I raced into his room and played some video games.

As we raced, I randomly took a look outside and saw a figure tucked back in the woods but surely facing the house. It was definitely human, or at the very least one of those shape-shifting fuckers that could take human form surprisingly well.

I asked Riley, “Who’s that standing in the woods?”

Without looking up, he said, “It’s probably a ghost, just ignore it.”

“C’mon man,” I insisted, “I know that’s a human.”

“No you don’t,” he said, “Billy Elkins could be putting dummies all around town again. Now can we please just win this cup?”

“I want to tell Geneva,” I pleaded.

“No no!” he stopped, “Just think, if you tell Geneva it could turn into something big and my parents will get involved. Then I won’t have any more playdates for the rest of the summer, maybe even next! What if all that happens over a dummy?”

He had me convinced. “Alright,” I said in defeat, “But we better win this cup.”

He smiled and said, “There we go.”

We played and got our asses handed to us. When we finished, I saw Geneva and Carrie playing outside on the small patio. The figure at the edge of the woods was gone.

“See?” Riley assured me, “No big deal. Nothing to worry about.”

“I guess you were right man,” I said to him, “Now let’s go for the Banana Cup. I think we can win it this time.”

Yeah...we lost that one to.

After this, I went downstairs and saw Geneva and Carrie happily discussing their favorite dolls. I got Riley and I some sodas from the massive new fridge his father had just gotten and ran back upstairs to play some more Mario Kart with him.

After we completed the Banana Cup again, being only a few points away from victory and more prizes, Riley asked me a question that completely caught me off guard. He asked, “Did you hear about what happened at Sunny Friends?”

"No...what happened?" I asked, nervously.

My mother had never told me anything about why we left or who the men in the biohazard suits were or why a CSI unit was parked in the driveway. She had tried to leave it all in the past.

“Well,” he began before peeking around to make sure that Geneva and Carrie were still downstairs, “...they found a bunch of dead kids behind the daycare. They were all murdered a few days before it was shut down.”

“Woah,” I paused, “How do you know all of this?”

He pointed to the wall next to us and explained that his mother constantly talked to his aunt about some of the things that went on in town, and he heard her talking about the daycare a few days before I had come over.

"How many died?" I asked.

“I don’t know,” he informed me. “I heard my mom say, ‘those poor kids. I can’t believe that it happened. But at least it was only five and neither of my babies was one of those kids.'”

I paused for a moment trying to think of something to say. After a few seconds, the clearest question I could ask came to mind; “Did they catch the killer?”

“Don’t know,” he said, “My mom changed the subject after that. They talked about something called misogyny."

Then, I connected some blanks that my young, mostly innocent mind had been missing. “What if that guy in the backyard was the killer?” I asked frantically, “What if he was coming to kill us?”

“Dude, seriously?” Riley asked unamused, “That’s ridiculous. Actually, that’s just stupid.”

“Think about it. Why would he be hiding at the edge of the woods?” I asked.

“Because there’s the trail that goes over to Cressy Pond that goes behind our house?” he suggested, clearly trying to change the subject. "Come on man can we just go back to the games? We can unlock a new character if we try!"

I frowned at this. But, defeated, I opened my DS and said, “Well then let's get the ghosts.”

With that, we raced for the rest of the day.

Around six o’clock, Carrie came upstairs and told us dinner was ready and my mom would be coming to pick me up around quarter of seven.

After dinner and a fun conversation with Geneva and Carrie, my mother arrived. I remember while talking to Carrie and Riley that I noticed my mother trying not to cry and handing Geneva fifty dollars, probably for taking care of me on top of the twins.

On the ride home, my mom explained to me that I was very lucky that I was able to go over to their house that day, and that it probably wouldn’t happen again that summer.

Naturally, I’d managed to mostly forget about the murders at the daycare.

I woke up around eleven o’clock and had to pee, badly. I raced out to the bathroom right next to my parents’ room and noticed my mom crying. After I went to the bathroom I went to go see why she was in tears.

She shook her head and said, “It’s nothing honey, I’m just sad.”

“Because of the kids killed at the daycare?” I asked.

She slowly looked up at me, dumbfounded at what had just come out of my mouth. “Honey,” she began, “How did you know about that?”

“Riley said he heard it from his mom,” I told her.

She paused for a minute and wiped tears from her cheeks. “Yes honey,” she said as she sniffled, “I’m sad that something so terrible happened.” She paused again and looked at me before asking, “Did he say anything else?”

I was confused, but I told her the truth. “No.”

"Okay," she said, "Now go back to bed please."

I followed her orders and went back to bed. Even as a foolish child, I still knew that there was more to why my mother was crying, and I was determined to figure it out.

The next day, my grandfather came over to watch me. He was very good with kids and probably one of the nicest men you'd ever be able to meet. He also didn't bother to hide anything from anyone.

I used this to my advantage and asked him if he knew anything about what had happened at the daycare.

"You mean all those kids that were murdered?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Yeah, it's a real shame. I gotta wonder if the kid that the police found yesterday had anything to do with that. As awful as it sounds, I'd hope one child murderer is responsible and not a bunch of them," he explained.

I was deeply unsettled. There was another murder and it was likely from the same person.

It wouldn't be until school started that I found out the boy who was murdered was Dylan Copperfield. He was killed on the same day I was at Riley's, and his body was dumped at Cressy Lake; only about half a mile away from Riley's house.

Three days after school began, the police caught the killer. The man responsible for these six gruesome child murders was Colin Schwartz, an employee of the daycare. I actually remembered who he was, he often made the food for most of us. Colin was arrested and quickly charged with all six murders and he plead guilty to all of them.

Colin’s appearance did, in fact, match that of the man who I saw in the woods behind Riley’s house.

The town also wanted the man who owned and operated the daycare, Jason Holdsworth, held liable for the awful crimes as well. After all, he hired Colin thinking he was an employee that was capable of handling children.

Eventually, they came to their senses and stopped blaming Jason. Well, the rest of the town, but maybe not the families of the murdered children.

Riley and Carrie managed to stay friends with me for years after this. I drifted apart from Rachel and Eden and eventually Kadyn as well, but Riley and Carrie and I were always pretty close. After graduation, we didn’t talk too much. We added each other on all forms of social media and liked posts and saw stories and such, but we rarely messaged each other.

As far as I know, everyone from that group except for Eden disappeared on April Fool’s Day. I don’t know about Kadyn, as the last time I talked to her I’d kind of insulted her boyfriend’s intelligence and she wished to no longer speak to me. Hell, she might not even be living in the town anymore.

Colin Schwartz is serving six life sentences. If he hasn’t already, he will die in prison.

You know, it's funny. When I think back on it, I remember that Eden and I both had the vampire parasites around the same time. We both got our families very sick as well. But no one else I was friends with at that point got sick.

Holy shit!

I think I know what happened to my town.

I Live in A Town That Doesn't Exist: Sunny Friends (Part 1)

Series By: deathfox919

So life is a bitch. Most of you know that, but I'll reiterate it. I have had to move out Tacoma, Washington and get a job, which was a major pain in my ass. But, I wanted to begin sharing more stories with all of you lovely people now that I'm beginning to have a stable life again. I hope some of you guys remember me, as it's been a very long time since I posted. Regardless, here we go.

Let me tell you a story from my childhood.

Even with a strange town like mine, I have many moments of nostalgia from my earlier years. I often fondly look back on my elementary and middle school years. Hell, anything before I was due to go off to college was a very fond memory. All you adults out there can probably testify. God how I wish I could go back to those simpler days.

This is one of the few stories from my childhood that I do not recollect all that often. When I do, it sure as hell isn’t out of fondness. Let me tell you about Sunny Friends Daycare.

My father didn’t retire until two years ago, and he worked many years at an architecture firm in the nearby city. His days were long and mostly uneventful, but he made some insane money off of his job. My mother was a special education teacher at the local middle school until she got a much better job offer to work in the financial aid office at a large university about an hour or so away. The only catch was that she’d be working basically all year round, and she’d have to go to the office on campus.

This was back in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, so I wasn’t really old enough to be taking care of myself home alone for about nine hours a day. Both of my parents realized this, and that’s when they reached out to Sunny Friends Daycare.

One of the moms my mom hung out with all the time sent her kids, Riley and Carrie (whom I talked to somewhat regularly for a long time), over to the daycare and they loved it. My mom probably looked into it for two full minutes then just signed me up. To be fair to my mother, she didn’t normally do this. She pulled an all-nighter once making sure the summer camp I went to after completing sixth grade would be safe and enjoyable. It wasn’t even out of fear that Jason Voorhees haunted that camp or anything like that, she was just being motherly.

My mom sat me down one Saturday and explained that she was starting a new job and that I would be going to Sunny Friends Daycare during the week for most of the summer.

I put up a bit of a fuss, but then accepted it.

That Monday, we arrived at the daycare and my mom kissed me before she ushered me out of the car. Upon stepping out of her Saab, I saw that there were some kids that I recognized there. Kadyn Nowitzki and Rachel Dunn and of course Riley and Carrie were all there. Riley spotted me and asked me if I wanted to come to play with the action figures in the big playroom. I quickly felt myself liking the daycare and soaking up the experience like nobody’s business.

After the first week, we had managed to make a friend circle. It was comprised of Riley and Carrie, Rachel, Kadyn, Ivan Byrde, and Eden Duquette. We invented a secret language and secret hand symbols and did everything that ten-year-olds would do together.

For the most part, we were the oldest kids there, so not many of the others wanted to be friends with us. Connie Winston was almost twelve but she liked to pretend like she was an adult and basically ignored all of us children. She’s a prostitute in New Orleans now and makes about twice my annual salary in a month.

Either way, I was quickly looking forward to daycare every day and always wanted to bring whatever toys I could. I brought my Nintendo DS and we would all play Mario Kart together in the corner. Rachel usually screamed like a banshee when she lost (having heard a banshee twice in my life, I can say that Rachel had an obnoxiously loud scream) and got us into trouble. Other than that, we were usually the saints of daycare.

We took care of ourselves, cleaned up after ourselves, didn’t go out of our way to destroy the place, and we knew how to use the bathroom. We became employee favorites and Becca Thompson would always bring us Snickers bars on Fridays to show her appreciation for being (mostly) in control of ourselves and potty-trained.

Miles Vandermeer was seven years old and was still wearing diapers because he was too afraid to shit on an actual toilet. If I remember correctly, it remained that way until eighth grade for him.

Again, we were the saints of daycare.

I remember the day Rachel beat me in a race on Rainbow Road and I knocked over this massive box of miscellaneous crayons out of pure childish anger. That was the only time I remember Becca, or anyone at the daycare for that matter, being angry with me. I don’t even remember getting a bad placement, I think I finished third and I was just pissed Rachel had managed to beat me.

Now I’ll get to the strange and horrific nature of this story. Otherwise, why would I be telling you about this daycare? No one wants to listen to something like that, not here at least.

In the summer of 2008, our town was seeing more tourism than usual, if you can even call people passing through to get to the state park tourism. We also had about ten different families move into a new suburban sprawl by my apartment building. Compared to 2006 or 2007, we were flush with money and we had no idea what to do with it. The board considered putting it into a YMCA center on the north end of town, but that fell through. I’m not positive this is why that happened, but I feel like it certainly has something to do with it.

On August 7th, my mom dropped me off at daycare as per usual. I ran inside and cheerfully greeted Riley and Carrie who were sitting in our little corner of the room ready to play some more Mario Kart (we’d played a bunch of games that summer, but always kept coming back to Mario Kart). Rachel and Eden showed up a few minutes later and I insisted on playing some races from the Lightning Cup, as I could never unlock it. The day flew by and before I knew it, I went home. I had also had Ivan help me unlock the Lightning Cup, and played Banshee Boardwalk until the music drove me to near insanity.

On Friday, August 8th, my mom pulled up to daycare, and I was thrilled to see Becca and get to choose which candy bar I got (since we had been extra good that week). However, she turned the car back around and drove me home when she saw three police cars in front of the building and two men in biohazard suits walk around the back of the bright blue structure.

I never saw the biohazard suits, I just saw the police cars with their blue lights flashing like crazy and my mother’s petrified face before pulling a U-Turn in the middle of Harper Road, which is one of the more traveled roads in town, and flooring it back home.

When we got home, she told me to go to my room and to wait there for her. I protested a bit and asked if I was in trouble. She assuaged me and said that I wasn’t as long as I went up there now, shut the door, and let her make a few private phone calls.

I did that while she called Riley and Carrie’s mom, who had just gotten off the phone with Eden’s mom while trying to get the number for Kadyn’s mom.

Five corpses had been found in the woods just behind Sunny Friends Daycare. All of them were of children who attended the daycare. One of them was Ivan. It didn’t seem like some monster in the woods killed them or a cult sacrificed them or anything like that. It just seemed like five random children were lured into the woods by some psychopath and bludgeoned to death with an object like a hammer.

Sunny Friends was obviously shut down and left for dead. Every single employee was put under a strong microscope by the police to see if any of them could’ve done it. None of them were deemed the killer.

My mom was able to get a week off, mostly because the financial aid office wasn’t too overwhelmed at the moment so that she could find me another place to go during the week.

I Live in A Town That Doesn't Exist: The Payphone

Series By: deathfox919

Hello NoSleep. I am still (somewhat) alive. The last time I posted about my tiny ass town that technically doesn't exist was a long time ago. I told you I was going to go help Davis, Langdon and the other agents, and none of that worked out. I am currently residing with a friend in Idaho while my town is going through some...issues shall we say.

To sum up what has happened over the past three weeks or so, this is what Rick and I found out after exploring this situation a bit more. The agency that came to our town didn't exist, and we have absolutely no clue who Davis and Langdon were working for or how they knew so much about our town. The eastern half of the United States is a pretty broad area, so I know they weren't getting it from my posts here. Also, the hole on Mulberry Lane was basically a portal to Hell and would trigger a Shaun of The Dead situation with all of the people who went missing. Our town lost 2,000 residents and there's no way to get them back. Also, we lost all electricity for the foreseeable future and my apartment building burned down, so me and Eddie are out west now.

Anyways, I figured since some of you guys are somewhat interested in some of the other experiences I've had in my voodoo-ass Twilight Zone town from Satan's butthole, here's what happened with the payphone.

Before I found out that the University of Florida didn’t know I even existed and I was working at the grocery store, I had a very chill job at a small entry point to the large state park that stretches across about half of the unincorporated territory to the north of us (that we’re technically part of, according to the rest of the world).

Basically, I’d stand in a small hut and wait for people to drive up. If they had a certain license plate, they could get into the state park for free. If not, then they had to pay around five bucks for parking and I’d give them a little ticket to put on their dashboard. This was about a year before shit hit the fan for Rick and he became totally reclusive, so he helped pull some strings to allow me to get the job, as I wasn’t due to be eighteen until September.

Now there are definitely some stories I could tell you about this job, like the bear-humanoid hybrid that hunts people for sport or the supposed witch that lives alongside a large and fairly well-known mountain, but this isn't about those. This is about the payphone.

For some ridiculous reason, the park still has a payphone. It’s located right across from my little hut where I’d spend about ten percent of the time letting people into the park and ninety percent of my time Facebook stalking my classmates. I'm a bored teenager, shut up.

I worked at that park for almost six months, and only once did I ever see someone use that payphone. It was an elderly woman who probably didn’t know what a cell phone is, let alone how to use one.

However, that phone became a very interesting point in my life one rainy and foggy July afternoon.

I remember that some thrill seekers had come through expecting to go for some white-water rafting on the valley river that cuts through the park about a mile north of where my entrance was. About fifteen minutes later, after they had all chanted “Woo hoo!” and sped up the small hill and out of sight, I heard muffled ringing coming from somewhere close. It sure as shit wasn’t my cell or any cell phone that existed in 2015. It sounded a lot like an outdated...payphone. My stomach dropped as I glanced across the gravel road.

Yep. The payphone was receiving a call.

I let it ring twice more before it went quiet and the sound of the rain pattering on the roof and the ground around me continued.

I talked to my boss, Bradley Noyer, the next day about what had happened. Bradley kind of just shrugged it off and said something along the lines of, “Kid, strange shit happens here every day. Yesterday, someone heard blaring horns coming from the ground underneath them. I guarantee you that your phone call is not as strange as that.”

So I kind of shrugged it off too. Bradley had also lived through a lot of shit, so I took his word for it.

It wasn't until the very end of July when I heard the payphone ring once again. It was almost dusk, the last hint of sunlight was disappearing behind one of the larger hills near my entrance to the park, and it was getting somewhat harder to see without an artificial light source. The dim neon over the payphone allowed me to see the jet black phone moving as it rang.

I contemplated going over to the other side of the gravel road and picking up the phone, but I had an odd feeling about it. Something deep inside of me told me that if I went over to that phone, I would very much regret it.

Now I would’ve brushed this occasion off as well, but the phone rang again the next day, and then the next day, and the next.

About two weeks into the payphone ringing again and again, the curiosity ate away at me like rust on a fifty-year-old bridge spanning a river. I had taken up to noticing that the phone rang at 8:24 PM on the dot. Back when it began constantly ringing, 8:24 meant the sun was almost completely below the horizon. Two weeks later, it meant almost total darkness.

So, now as I’m expecting the phone to begin ringing. I leave the little hut at 8:23 and head over to the payphone. I loitered there for just a moment and patiently waited for the phone to ring. I was finally going to figure out who was calling and why.

RIIIIING

I snatched up the phone and put it to my ear. “Hello?” I asked sporadically, “Who is this?”

There wasn’t a single sound coming from the other end.

“Hello?” I asked again, “Why are you calling?”

For about twenty seconds, there was nothing but dead air on the other end. Then, I heard the tone suggesting that the caller had hung up. Feeling mostly defeated, I hung the phone back up and shuffled back over into the cabin.

This became a ritual of mine. I'd answer the phone and get nothing, then just go back inside the shed and wait until nine or ten when someone else would come in and I could go home.

One day, I had completed this ritual and was shuffling back into the hut when the phone rang once more. I turned around and sprinted over to the other side of the gravel road and nearly took out the phone before I picked up.

“Hello?” I panted into the phone, trying to breathe normally.

As I tried to hold myself together, I heard a very deep and raspy voice say my name on the other end of the line.

My full name. First name. Middle name. Last name.

I have a very unusual middle name, to the point where maybe four people outside of my family know what it is. I would write here what it is, but I don’t want to have anything like this happen again.

The man (I’m guessing it was a man from the deep voice) inhaled through what sounded like clenched teeth and giggled. The giggle made my stomach twist itself into a lead ball and I felt like all of my organs were about to forcefully remove themselves from my asshole.

The man then said the name of my town.

This made me want to throw up, as not a single person I know outside of this town actually knows the name of this town. Many locals that actually bother to come through here call it “Sky Village,” which is not the actual name of my town.

The voice spoke one more time.

“See...you...soon.”

With a click and a tone, the call had been disconnected.

I then vomited on the ground next to the payphone. Before anything else, I scrambled back into the hut and slammed the door shut before I locked it. Then, I ducked under the table like a scared six-year-old just to make sure that no one could see me from the outside, as there was no way to cover the window.

A new kind of curiosity began eating away at me: I needed to know where the call had come from.

Considering I had some decent wi-fi in the hut (for us teenagers who were bored out of their minds watching the park), I looked up how to trace payphone calls. I knew that I had heard of someone being able to do that back when I was a kid, so I figured it was my best bet.

Eventually, some Google link told me that if I hit star 69, I could get an operator to tell where the last call had come from if the number wasn’t blocked. So, I pranced across the road once more and pressed *69 and waited.

The call was coming from a city in northern Idaho.

I had never heard of this place (turns out it’s actually fairly populated and is just outside of Spokane), didn’t know anyone from the state of Idaho, at the time at least, and knew that no one who was basically on the opposite side of the country would know about our hellhole town.

So how the fuck did they know this?

I hung up and wandered back to the hut in an almost zombie-like trance. Again, I locked the door and rubbed my temples trying to calmly figure out what to do.

Well, Glen Mauro came into relieve me of my duty around nine o’clock and asked me why I was so shaken. I told him about the phone.

“You answered it?” he asked.

I nodded.

Glen looked over at the phone, then back at me. I was concerned with the fact that his normally happy demeanor had seemed to have completely diminished. “What?” I asked.

“You didn’t trace the call, did you?” he asked, his voice shaky and shy.

I didn’t say anything. I mean, he could read me better than any book (I promise, Glen, that isn’t a poke at your dyslexia), so he already knew what I was gonna say.

“In about five minutes, we’re gonna get another call. You need to answer that one. Just talk to him normally, it’ll help the police tap it,” he told me.

I was petrified at this.

Sure enough, about five minutes after Glen had told me that, we heard the phone ring. The ring was not normal, it sounded muffled. Also, it was demonically low in tone. Glen was back in the hut dialing 911, while I shuffled over to the phone trying not to blubber like a little bitch before I answered.

“He-hello?” I stuttered.

That goddamn voice came back on the other end. “Is this [insert my full fucking name here] of [my town’s exact name]?”

I looked back at Glen, silently begging him to make it all stop. He just nodded at me before I turned back to look at the payphone.

“Umm...yes,” I said, still holding back my fear.

“I can see you, you know,” the man said. He made that terrible childlike giggle again, which made me break out in goosebumps. I had to do some impromptu kegel exercises to make sure I didn’t piss my pants.

“You...y-you can?”

“You’re the one in the red collared shirt on the shitty payphone, aren’t you?” he said. I swore his voice had gotten deeper as that sentence progressed.

From inside the cabin, I heard Glen shout into the phone, “I need you here right now sheriff! Shit’s gonna get very real and neither of us are equipped for that!”

On the other end of the payphone, I hear, “Tell Glen to keep quiet.”

Without hesitation, I lost my shit and threw the phone back in its hook before racing back into the hut screaming like an absolute lunatic. Glen looked at me like a great dane had just burst out of my asshole and was singing “Sweet Caroline,” while I slammed the door shut and locked it tight.

“What the fuck are you doing!?” he screamed at me.

I don’t even remember what I said back to him. I don’t think they were actual words from any known language, just made up sounds and something along the lines of “your name on the phone,” before I blacked out for about ten minutes.

When I came to, a police officer asked me what happened to Glen. I was so confused, but also freaking out. “Is Glen dead?” I asked.

“We don’t know. The call to 911 was cut and I didn’t get here until about two minutes ago,” the deputy told me.

I looked up and saw that the window to the hut was shattered and Glen’s Nalgene had cracked open and spilled water everywhere. He still wears the t-shirt he got from that.

After a brief interrogation where I told them exactly what had been happening for so long, I went home and tried to get some sleep. Of course, I wouldn’t get any sleep at all while my mind ran wild thinking about that goddamn payphone.

By the time the sun rose the next day, Glen was found. Naturally, he was found in a weird location, but this takes the cake for the strangest missing person report in my lifetime that occurred within this town.

Glen was found sixty miles north of our entry to the state park we worked. He was at a parking area for a somewhat well-known hiking trail off of a state highway. He was completely unharmed. But he had absolutely no clue of how he got there. In fact, he only remembered up to the point where he came into the hut and started talking to me; he had no idea that he called 911 to report the guy on the payphone.

Glen and I still hang out sometimes, usually at nights when we’re both off of work and have a minute to spare. We’d go to his apartment, which is tricked out as shit, and just chill for a few hours a week.

He’s still here even after the mass disappearance of seemingly everyone.

However, there’s one thing that really gets to me.

I had taken notice to a small whiteboard shoved into the corner by the filing cabinet that was only noticeable because of the light reflecting off of manila folders of the desk. There were seven tally marks on the whiteboard.

After that night, I counted eight tallies.

I Live In A Town That Doesn't Exist (Part 4)

Series By: deathfox919

Well, I am back. It’s only been two days since I last posted, but a lot of shit has changed. Now my town is on the brink of not existing at all.

I woke up Tuesday morning and realized that what had been bugging me was the seeming lack of other people in my town. Hell, when I came back to my apartment building the day before it didn’t seem like anyone else was there.

Well, that’s because the town population had dropped from 2,407 down to 407.

I remember driving down main street and passing the small diner, the cafe, the town hall, the library, the grocery store, and every other building you can imagine a small east coast town having. There was no sign of life anywhere. In all that time, I saw the old couple that owned the cafe on their deck and Freddy Nixon smoking marijuana in his beaten Chevrolet Chevelle.

On my way back to my house, I passed a horribly mutilated body sitting on the side of Garland Way towards the turn off to Mulberry Lane. Two crows were picking away at the man’s intestines through the grotesque wound in his stomach. I didn’t recognize the man.

Once I got back to my apartment, I heard Miss Johnston’s beagle whimpering from behind her apartment door. I figured that if I still heard him whimpering in a couple hours, I would take in the poor pup. For some reason, it was a lot colder than the past couple days. On Monday it had been almost sixty degrees, but Tuesday felt like it was maybe forty-five degrees at most.

Not five minutes after I came back home, Davis and Langdon had come by and informed me of the situation. I knew most of the town was gone, but they told me only four hundred and seven people were left. Two thousand people managed to vanish into thin air over the past twenty four hours. A couple of their agents had vanished too, one of them being Moore.

After looking through the confirmed missing in the town, we found out that Victoria, James, and Katie had all disappeared. We couldn’t tell with Oz just yet, he could still be in the Snake Fort. Last time, he was lost in there for almost five days, but he’d managed to make friends with most of the snakes.

Now we were crossing into dangerous territory. Something of this extent had never happened in the strange history of this town. This had never happened...well ever.

I talked with Davis over some scotch that afternoon about this, about how odd and disastrous this really was.

“I’ve been with this company for eleven years now and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he began. He took a massive swig of his scotch and polished off the entire glass before pouring himself some more. “Hell, I bet none of this agency has. We’ve been around since 1805, yet I guarantee that none of them would’ve seen the day where two thousand people just fell off the face of the Earth.”

“You really think that this is the weirdest thing that’s happened in your agency’s history?” I asked him as I fiddled with my glass, mindlessly.

“Oh I know it,” he said timidly, “We’ve seen a lot of shit over the years. Hell, I knew a guy who once saw a twenty foot tall werewolf-ish monster climb Mount Rushmore before a chopper shot it down on top of Jefferson’s head. I guarantee you he’d be shitting himself if we put him in this situation.”

“There is no way that this happened,” I told him, scoffing at his tale of a giant werewolf climbing Mount Rushmore like something out of the movie Rampage.

“Remember back in 2008 when the news reported that some of the heads on Mount Rushmore needed extensive maintenance?” he asked me, “They were repairing the claw marks.”

I didn’t know what to say. Luckily for me, Davis continued talking.

“We’ve known how to fix every situation to date, except for this one. I am completely stuck on how this situation is going to be resolved,” he informed me as he threw back even more whiskey.

I looked over at Langdon, who was reading a novel entitled Penpal. “Whatcha reading?” I asked him.

“A novel about a kid who keeps receiving letters from a creepy stranger,” he told me, “It’s pretty decent, and very well thought out.”

“How do you feel about this shitshow?” I asked him.

“I think that we’re stuck in a situation we can’t fix,” he sighed, “I think that if we try, we will only make things worse. I think your town is in a great matter of trouble and that the four hundred people left alive should be cautious over the next few weeks.”

“So...you think this shit can’t be fixed?” I asked him. I finally took a gulp of the smooth scotch that Davis had brought over. It was incredible, but it wasn’t a thought that stayed on my mind for very long.

“I think that we’re approaching an impasse,” Langdon told me. He put down his book and stood up now. “Yesterday, when we had you and your co-workers stand in front of the hole, we realized that none of you could be seen on any of the monitors. We don’t know what exactly is happening at the site, but we know it’s very dangerous and that this level of a threat has never been seen in this agency’s history.”

“So basically, because this hole showed up underneath one of the houses on Mulberry Street, about eighty or ninety percent of this town disappears into fucking thin air?” I asked in complete disbelief.

“I know that this must be hard to hear Mark, but I assure you that we’re trying to figure out what is going on as fast as possible,” he assuaged.

“No you’re not!” I barked. Even I didn’t expect that, but nonetheless, it happened. “Davis is sitting at my kitchen counter getting plastered off of the best goddamn scotch I’ve ever had and you’re reading a fucking book!”

“Look, every other agent besides Watson is at the site right now trying to figure out if anything else is due to come our way,” Langdon assured me.

“Who is the shit is Watson!?” I asked, “And why in the everloving fuck isn’t he helping out to?”

“He is talking to Lily right now, because you and her are the only ones left in this town that work at that goddamn grocery store,” he said, clearly more irritated now, “All of the others are missing, even fucking Bob who popped up just a few days ago!”

Davis poured himself yet another glass of scotch in the midst of my argument with Langdon. I’m positive he wasn’t even phased by what was going on.

“Well, then why are you here?” I asked, “Why are you in my apartment? And why the fuck is Watson with Lily?”

“We were checking in on you two, but clearly you have it covered on your own!” Langdon turned to Davis and said, “Let’s go try and save this town before we all end up descending straight down to Hell.”

Davis rose to his feet and told me the scotch was mine. I’d end up finishing the entire bottle within the night.

As Langdon walked out, he turned back to me and said, “You know, you’re lucky you don’t share the town’s name in your Reddit posts or the town’s population would drop by one more person. Believe me, we don’t need that.”

The two of them left and I just stood there alone in my apartment. I didn’t move or speak and I barely breathed the whole damn time. Eventually, I heard the faint whimpering of Miss Johnston’s beagle and remembered that six hours had passed since I promised myself I’d go check on the poor thing. I went down to the landlord’s place and eventually found the key to her apartment. The dog raced out to greet me and I gladly gave it a belly rub before I took it back to my apartment and gave it a little bit of sliced turkey from my fridge and some water in a small tupperware container.

Later that day I went back to Miss Johnston’s apartment and grabbed the beagle’s dog bed, food and water bowl, and his collar to reveal his name was Eddy. He didn’t even bother with the dog bed, he snuggled with me to sleep that night.

Yesterday wasn’t much of anything, just me sitting around in a haze of depression mixed with disbelief over the fact that most of the people I knew were probably dead and that I was stuck in a situation where there was nothing I could do except wait for the agents to come up with a plan.

My mother and father are still alive and my sister moved to Annapolis about two weeks before the vans even showed up, so at least that’s a plus.

Now, we’re here.

And now that I’ve typed out just how helpless I’ve felt, I’m going to go try and fix this situation. Fuck waiting around for the agents to solve the puzzle, I’ve lived in this town longer than most of them have known it’s existed.

I hope to update you again soon. If I don’t update within a week, then I guess I should’ve stayed home with Eddy.

I Live In A Town That Doesn't Exist (Part 3)

Series By: deathfox919

It’s been a hot minute since I posted, but good God do I have something to tell you guys.

After I posted my update last Saturday at around noon, I went down to the grocery store where low and behold, I saw Bob with my own two eyes. Victoria and Lily were also there, and James was supposedly coming down to.

“Bob, what the fuck are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Well, I think I should wait until James gets here so I can explain it to him as well,” Bob told me.

“And what about Katie and Oz?” Victoria asked.

“I ran into Katie last night and told her already, and Oz got lost in one of those Snake Forts again,” Bob explained, “I only know that because I saw him outside of it and...well, you guys remember what happened last time.”

I’ll explain the Snake Forts later.

We barely had a moment to think about what Bob told us before James came into the store and was shocked just like I was to see our supposedly dead boss standing before us, looking more lively than he had in the past few months.

“Well, I guess there’s no point in waiting for the agents to get here. They already know,” Bob said, avoiding eye contact with any of us.

“So the guys who were here yesterday are involved?” Victoria asked, “Why the Hell doesn’t that surprise me?”

What none of us knew is that they wouldn’t be here for a long time.

Krasinski and one of the men who took James to the store (by force) on Friday stayed in a house on Mulberry Lane on Friday night, and forgot to follow the code of conduct everyone in this town knows pretty goddamn well. For someone who is supposedly analyzing the anomalies of this town, they weren’t doing a very good job at it. I guess that’s why Davis and Moore were late coming to the store on Saturday afternoon.

“A few months ago, I started feeling really under the weather. I told everyone here that I had pneumonia, but that was not the case.” He bowed his head for a moment. “I remember driving along the old dirt road by Chester’s Garage and having a coughing fit. I pulled over and tried to give myself a moment to breathe, and then I don’t remember anything until Thursday night.” He scratched his temple. “I was standing in the middle of the field that was right next to that dirt road. I looked at the condominiums across the street and they all looked dead. Then I wandered back towards town and came across Davis, and now I’m here.”

I paused. Things were starting to make a bit of sense now. “So...is that why we were all huddled up in that bunker last night?”

“Davis said something about an artificial being roaming the woods around the quarry, so I don’t think so,” James informed me.

“When did you talk to him?” I asked.

“Like three hours ago, when he came through to make sure the grocery store was still shut down. He said, ‘We can’t take any chances.’”

I paused again. Victoria kept asking Bob questions, but I was more focused on the fact that all of my rational thoughts had just imploded and now I was stuck in this twisted mystery. Nothing here really added up.

We waited for another two hours before Davis showed up. He was alone as Langdon, Moore, and the other men were still cleaning up the mess made by Mulberry Lane. The house they stayed in would be torn down a day later, due to something awful in the basement. I have no idea what they found, but it can’t be good.

We all grilled him about being late and what the fuck was happening with Bob, naturally, and he didn’t have a much better explanation than Bob.

“From what I can tell, it seems he contracted one of the viruses we keep in the basement of the E-Z Mart. My best guess would be Homestrux, an ancient virus we found on a dig in New Mexico. It causes a coma that lasts for anywhere from two to eight months and has flu like symptoms leading up to the coma.” He paused. I could see sweat beads breaking out on his forehead. “The problem is this; we don’t know how it got out. This also still doesn’t explain how the fake Bob was here for so long and why we found his remains in the baseball diamond.”

That’s really all we got from Davis.

As of right now, Bob is still legally dead. We have no idea what to expect about the other eight people who were found to be dead in the baseball diamond.

Naturally, when it comes to this town, the story doesn’t end there.

Sunday went by without incident. All I really did was lounge in my apartment and begin looking for other jobs as I knew the grocery store wouldn’t be open for a long time and I’d end up being evicted soon enough.

However, this town had a sick April Fool’s joke waiting for all of us.

I woke up yesterday morning to about ten different texts and two voicemails. I have the tendency to sleep like the dead once I actually manage to get comfortable, which is something everyone hates. I even tried to make my ringtone a Slipknot song so that I would actually wake up, but evidently that doesn’t work either.

To sum it all up, the house that the agents tore down on Mulberry Street had a tunnel running underneath the ground. Smoke was coming out of it and when Moore entered he could see a faint orange glow far ahead. Lily called me not even five minutes after I had woke up and demanded that I get my ass down there.

Of course, I obliged.

When I arrived at the scene, I saw that Langdon and one of the other agents that I had seen with James on Friday were inside one of the black vans fiddling with equipment. Langdon looked up for a brief moment and made eye contact with me. I could’ve sworn that there was fear swirling around in his eyes.

He jumped out of the van and ran over to me. “Mark! I need you to go over to the house for a second. Stand over by Victoria and Lily.”

Again, I obliged. I walked across the lawn and over towards the hole in the ground that had formed when the house was demolished.

He went back into the van and closed the door this time. It was maybe ten minutes later that he and the other man came out, looking absolutely petrified. In the meantime, Moore was setting up a large canopy tent and Davis was setting up two tables with a multitude of laptops and other pieces of advanced technology.

“What do you think is going on?” Victoria asked me.

“I have no idea, but if these guys know about everything that goes on in this town, and they’re scared, then I think we’re going to be shitting our pants at whatever they find,” I told her.

Langdon came over to us. “You’re all free to go back to your homes, I think we got what we need.”

I couldn’t understand what the fuck was going on. I went back home and watched more Netflix, as I had all the time in the world apparently. But I never really watched it. I kept thinking about how weird the events of the past day had been.

What had they found under the house?

I knew it couldn’t be the Snake Fort Oz wandered into. Snake Forts look like large piles of sticks that the hyper-intelligent snakes that live in our woods build in order to have their offspring. They usually look similar to piles of hay, but they have been known to create tunnels as well. Oz got stuck in one of those tunnels before, and the snakes were fairly infuriated.

Something else was rubbing me the wrong way. I knew that the bobbing head hadn’t gotten into my apartment, as I had locked everything tight and you would be able to sense the stench of death before you even entered the building. Either way, I spent the rest of my day in a haze thinking about it.

Well, when I woke up this morning it finally dawned on me what was wrong, and why the town felt so empty.