Forever and A Day

It's been almost a year since I posted here. And it's not because nothing has happened, but because of the very opposite. Because my life sort of did a one eighty and now I'm somewhere else.

I'd love to sit here and tell you that I've moved away from the strange place where I saw those strange things. I'd also like to be able to tell you that I know now what those strange things were. If I said that, however, I'd be lying, and lying isn't exactly on my 'to-do' list.

In all truth, I moved a block away from where I was. A block. If anyone remembers this picture, I am now on the north side. See that street that turns north and then east? I am two houses before that turn. So.

I am now on the OTHER side of the creepy parking lot. Yippy fuckin' skippy. I wish you could hear the sarcasm that I'm injecting into that phrase in my mind as I type it, because there is a great deal of sarcasm to be heard here.

In the time since my last posting, I've finished high school, started at a local community college, and have gotten no closer to any answers than I was before, though I am pretty sure I now have more questions. And more sightings. Can't forget those.

I am now fully convinced that there is not one, but two...somethings living around here, one of which is either Slenderman, or his twin brother.

Or both.

And it doesn't make me happy. One is creepy as hell. One simply reeks of rot and corpses. Fun for the whole family. I've got to order dinner, but I'll come back and write up some of the crazy things that have happened in the past year. Trust me, some are doozies.

You Can Change Your Face, But Can't Change Your Mind

Have you ever had one of those moments when you became aware of something involving one of your senses, but you have no explainable reason why? Example: You suddenly become aware of exactly how something sounds, even though you've never heard it before?

Yea. Like that.

Last night, somewhere between 12-2, this happened. I'm not exactly sure what time it was(it gets really, really dark where I live, and I can't see the moon to even get a guestimation, even though I was never a Girl Scout hahah, disregard how I'd know that, I suck cocks, etc). I was sitting at my desk, wrapping up some homework, when I smelled something that literally made me throw up in the trashcan beside me.

Now, I'll be honest: I have smelled some noxious stuff in my life. Once, when I was younger, my mom hit a skunk with the car, and that was seriously horrible. I'm familiar with the odor of burnt hair, and burnt other things(but not flesh, thankfully). I've smelled raw sewage, I've smelled a river with way too much pollution in it, I've smelled a garbage dump, all that, but...

...what I smelled last night was....I don't know, it was like that sort of sulphury swamp smell, and the smell of rancid meat - you know, something in the fridge that has gone distinctly bad. And it wasn't sour, either. Not like, dairy sour. Milk, sour cream, stuff like that has a very particular odor to it. Same as meat that's gone bad - it's got a unique, distinct smell, all it's own. This was like, part bad meat, and part overripe banana, that's gotten too sweet for it's own good.

So imagine sitting there, minding your own business, when you're suddenly surrounded by this cloud of odors: fetid swamp, overripe bananas, rancid meat. All at once - it did not have the courtesy of sneaking up on me, bit by bit, oh no. Just BAM, right there. It was so bad and so sudden that my eyes literally started to water. I have no idea where it came from - I was the only person in the house that was awake. No one had cooked anything, no one had cleaned out the fridge, no one had done anything with garbage or anything.

After horking up my cookies in the trashcan, I got up and stumbled out of my room, down the hallway...and it was gone. The hall was completely free of the odor, and after going into the bathroom and rinsing my mouth out/brushing my teeth, I went back to my room, rag over my nose, in preparation to face the horrendous odor beast, only to find that the smell was not present anymore.

Mind you, part of me was seriously relieved because I'm pretty sure, looking back on it, that had it been there, I'd've gotten sick all over again. That's how bad it was. The other part of me was seriously weirded out, because the fact that the odor was suddenly there, and suddenly gone, did not make me feel better.

Needless to say, I didn't get my homework finished. Almost did - finished it a few hours ago. I just finished going through the house, trying to see if I could find the source of the Very Bad Smell, but there's nothing out of the ordinary, nor have I found any traces of maybe a small mouse or something, that might've gotten in and died - but that's virtually impossible, in this house. There's one door, and no windows in here. I don't see how a mouse could've gotten in.

I guess I should be thankful for that, though. Getting a dead rodent that smells like that out of the house would surely be my undoing. Ugh.

And Now For Something Completely Different.

I understand that my last post was about as cryptic as it could get, all things considered, but there's a reason for that.

I didn't want to talk about it.

Pretty simple, mind you, but totally true. Thanksgiving was coming up and I didn't want to spend what is otherwise a perfectly pleasant holiday worrying about something that had scared the everliving shit out of me. It's just bad juju, so to speak.  I did, however, have an amazingly awesome Thanksgiving with great food and great family, and on that front, I couldn't ask for more.

But I've decided to talk about what happened because of last night. Now, no, I didn't see anything. Didn't hear anything, for that matter, but as I was lying down to go to bed, I just got this feeling.

I'm not the type of person to have nightmares - and when I do, they fade so quickly that I rarely remember them anyway. I wasn't the kid that would wake up from night-terrors either. I didn't have issues with closet doors being open, nor did I ever tell my parents that I thought there was a monster under the bed. Last night though, I couldn't shake the feeling that if any of me hung off the bed, something was going to snatch me and drag me beneath it. So I pretty much spent all night positioning myself so that none of me was near the edge of the bed - which isn't easy, as I don't have a very big bed.

So after that, I've decided to write about what happened earlier this week. I'm not doing it to inform people - it's more of one of those things where I'm doing it to get it off my chest, get it out in the open, in hopes of feeling better. I don't know if it will work, but I'm gungho for it anyway, and once I set my mind to something, I generally go for it.

Basically, it was the same place as what happened before - in the lot behind my house, between my street and the grocery store. It was about seven at night - and with winter here, that means it was already dark - but I had run out of Dr. Pepper and seeing as there was pretty much nothing else to drink(save tap water and trust me, tap water here is balls), so I ran to the store real fast to get some.

I've updated my horrible sketch with an actual Google Map screenshot (I've blurred out street names, for my own protection. Don't need any stalkers!). The red dot is my house. The [X] is the strange chain length box I mentioned before. The greed stuff is the trees. The blue X is where I was at, when this all went down and the black X is what I saw this time(as opposed to last time. My old sketch is still up, if you want to see that.)

I was walking across the empty lot behind the small little cage when I see something at the far edge of the opposite woods. This would be the upper area in the diagram: the black lines indicate the curb that's right there. This whole lot, you see, is paved: it's the back side area for the grocery store, and several other stores. Right as I'm getting behind that cage, is when I noticed it(I'm not sure if that's relevant or not. It's the second time I've been there, that I've seen something).

Now, the last time I saw something, I know that I saw the form of a tall man, wearing a suit. Okay. That's cool. At the time, I didn't get a good look at him as he was quite a ways away from me, and I, personally, am about as blind as a bat. It would stand to reason that if I couldn't see him well in broad daylight, it's going to be harder in the dark, and I'll admit that, to a degree, it was harder, but...not because it was dark.

In my last post, I discussed the Slenderman, and all of the reading I've done up on him. I know what people say the Slenderman looks like. I know what to expect, but...what I saw was like...I don't know, the Slenderman in disguise? The Slenderman's older brother? I don't know.

It was a tall man (seriously tall. I've got good spacial perception, and I would guess that this man was easily over seven feet tall), wearing a black suit(I noticed his tie was red. Deep, rich red, like...bricks). But the weird thing was his face. Do you remember how, in school or something, when you watched a movie on an overhead? Or if your teacher used the overhead projector? And how, if they stood in front of it, it would project the image onto them? That is what his face was like. His face didn't look real, as if someone was just throwing an image on it. But it wasn't just his face. This man had hair, too - insanely long black hair, all the way down to the ground, almost.

He was far enough away from you that I can't give you exact details about his features - I don't know how big his nose was, you know? - but I remember his eyes, because they didn't seem like eyes at all. It was like he had two holes, where his eyes should've been, that were black.

--And before people start saying I saw some Masky bullshit, no. It wasn't like that. Masky is clearly wearing a mask, with black around the eyeholes. This wasn't like that. This was more like he didn't have eyes at all, but just holes in his face.

I had to have stood there ten minutes, not moving, watching this thing. I was afraid that if I moved, he'd hear me and then it would so be on. He/It/Whatever never so much as looked in my direction, though. It watched the sky, though. I don't know if he was just fucking stargazing or looking for UFOs to take him back to the mothership, or what, but I heard that sound again. That toothgrating, high-pitched warbling sound. It wasn't quite as bad this time, though - it was almost like it was two sounds, this time. There was the annoying sound, and another ....I don't know, hollow sound. It sort of reminded me of the very deep, empty sound of funeral bells. It was surprisingly sombre and sorta sad.

After about ten minutes or so, the suit-wearing dude just turned around and walked into that copse of trees right there. I'm pretty sure that was the longest ten minutes of my life, too. I was so sure that he was going to turn and look at me and then chase me home. I'm not entirely sure I'd've outrun him, either.

Months.

Months of nothing. Months of no sightings, no speculation. I had all but forgotten the strange man I saw out behind my house back in August.  Not that I didn't do research. I'd heard all these stories, all these rumors. I looked into the whole Marble Hornets thing and I have to say that I extend serious sympathy to those guys - all of them! - for what they are having to deal with.

For a while, I thought that what they were dealing with was what I'd seen. I thought that I had some huge, tall, faceless beast in the woods beside my house - or there was some thinny there, but no.

I'm pretty sure that's not what I've got. I'm not sure how to feel about that, either. How's that saying go? Better the evil you know? At least people know about the Slenderman. At least people are trying to fight that, trying to deal with that, trying to survive that. But now...

...the thing living, breathing, existing, whatever the fuck you want to call it, behind my house? It's not the Slenderman.

My monster has a face.

I don't care for it much. Not much at all.

A Terrible Illustration.

I said I'd get a drawing up of the layout of the empty lot by my house. It's a horrendous image, but I never said I was any good at drawing.

Empty lot.

So the purple dot is where I was. The [X] you see there is this weird...I dunno, box. It's basically a chain-link fenced in area that at one time might've had dumpsters or something to that effect in it, but now they're empty. I have no idea for sure if that's what it was for, but either way, I was walking right behind it when the suited man(represented by the red dot!) appeared. He just walked right out of those woods right there. I didn't hear him prior to his arrival. Not a sound. And then, he turns, faces the west(or left, in this picture, away from me), takes two steps, and poof. He's gone.

Veeeeeeeery weird.

Elaboration

Let's talk a bit about what I said yesterday, huh?

In case you don't know, a thinny is a term coined by Stephen King in his Dark Tower series that basically refers to a place where the fabric of the world(s) is thin, and things often slip from one dimension, realm, or even time, in these places.

Now, before I go any further, let me be perfectly clear: I am Christian, and as a result, I believe in Heaven, in Hell, in the afterlife. I also believe that sometimes, shit happens. I believe there's more in the world that we'd all like to believe, to make our lives easier. I'm open minded, not ignorant.

So a month ago, when I was walking home from the grocery store, in the slowly fading dusk...

...when I heard a strange sound, the kind that set my teeth to clenching, my ears to singing, my eyes to watering? I knew it wasn't just a passing truck. At first I thought it might be an electrical current or something - you know, if you get too close to a strong powerline? It must've been an invisible one. It wasn't a plane, I don't have fillings, no metal rods of any kind, in fact, and I was decidedly at a loss. It didn't last long - 30 seconds at the most - and I wrote it off. No big deal. Weird noise. Carry on, Rook.

My wayward son, I took myself home.

A week later, same thing happens. It wasn't night time - in fact, it was broad daylight(which was a good thing. We'll get to that.), I'd guess...2 p.m.? Somewhere around there. The sound really set me on edge again; not afraid, but it's a very nerve-wracking sound - it just seems to go straight to your bones. In fact: you know that feeling you get in the corners of your jaws, when you bite into a really good steak, or piece of fruit? I got that feeling; my mouth flooded with saliva.

So while this is happening, while I'm standing there, plastic bags in hand, trying to will away the headache to end all headaches, I notice something. There's this man, walking out of the woods that line are the northern end of the empty lot. I guess what surprised me was not the fact that he was there, but...

There's a dude(a tall dude, I might add), coming out of woods in an empty lot, dressed in a black suit in July. It just struck me as all kinds of weird, you know? It made zero sense to me. And even moreso was the fact I didn't hear him. Sure, I had heard that sound, but it was a sound you feel more than hear; I should've heard some guy tromping in the woods, you know? Irregardless, I didn't get the best look at him - and I'm pretty sure he didn't see me at all, he was facing the west.

So what does this have to do with a thinny?

...He took two steps forward, and vanished.

Yea.

I'll post a crude sketch of the lot and where I/he was sometime later, to give a better idea of things.

Warning: It will be no Michaelangelo.

In the Beginning...

...my father loved chess. He was also fond of birds. Furthermore, he loved to read.

You see where this is going, right? Because my mother didn't. There she is, laid up in the hospital bed, holding me to her chest, and she was so drugged up that when the person came around with that whole birth certificate bit, and asked what my name was?

There was my dad, forever reliable, to blurt out: "Rook."

...It has not been an easy life, let it be said. Fun, mind you - I'm not going to sit here and spout out 'woe is me' BS about how life has been hard; it hasn't. Interesting, occasionally the pits, but certainly never hard. Let's rewind to that 'interesting' bit, because it is. About a year ago, life just went from typical and normal to 'interesting'. The Chinese have a saying: "May your life be interesting."

They consider it a curse.

A year ago, my family and I moved to Maryland. It was not quite the eighteenth birthday present I wanted, to be fair. However, a few weeks after we moved up, I started to overlook that fact. I'm a stone's throw from two malls. There are plenty of conventions year round that I could go to, not to mention Renne Faire, which is awesome.

So all of these things are awesome, but the best part, I think, is the fact that..well..

Okay, hang on. Let me give a bit of back story, first.

I live in a cul-de-sac(that's a dead end street, for those of you not in the know), and while ours isn't the last house, it's close enough for government work. At the very end of the street is the end of the sidewalk, a path that loops around into an empty lot(that is mostly overrun by grass and further back, a brief smattering of woods), which leads into the back parking lot of the grocery store in my back yard. Not literally in my back yard, but you get the idea. I can walk to the grocery store. If we get snowed in? We don't have to worry about clearing the car out from under all that snow, nor shoveling our way to the street. Just get up, thrown on a good layer of clothes, and away you go.

Terribly helpful on those nights when it's 8:30, you don't feel like getting in the car just to drive around the block, you know.

But the best part of this is that...well...

I am pretty sure that that empty lot, a few doors down, overgrown with grass, peeking out of old, cracked concrete?

I think it may be a thinny.