Previously: After About 15 Minutes Of Talking I Started Hearing A Sound Outside – It Was My Voice
There are so many new developments it’s hard to figure out how to cram it all into 3,000 words.
The morning after I spoke with my fiancée, Faye, on the satellite phone (and then was visited by the thing that mimics our voices), I got a call from Richard and Jason. In case you don’t remember, they are my two best friends, and they’re staying at my place and taking care of Faye while I’m gone. They’re the only people I trust.
Richard stays up very late and sleeps in the morning, kind of like what I’m doing now. He does this for two reasons: to work on his art commissions and to make sure Faye doesn’t stab everyone to death and burn the house down in her sleep. The guys report that she is behaving quite normally and feeling good/being productive during the day, but then at night, she is unpredictable and weird. I feel like her soul is being cleaved in half; the two distinct sets of behavior are drifting farther from each other every day.
Around 1AM that night, Richard heard the voice of a young child, mumbling incoherently.
He is up to speed on all of the unusual experiences that have plagued my fiancée and me, so he immediately got up to investigate. He looked out the kitchen window, which faces the same part of the forest where I saw the man mimicking Faye’s sleepwalking movements. Richard didn’t find anything, so he walked a circle around the house and realized that the sound was coming from our bedroom window.
He went inside and woke Jason up, and they stood outside the bedroom door, listening. They claimed they heard the distinct sounds of a child whispering and softly singing, and I bet you can guess which song – “oh soul me aaaah do, I’m a naked soul me aaah dooo” (the song Faye and I heard outside of the cabin on our second night, sung in a child’s voice). Both of these dudes are super ripped climbing enthusiasts, and they said they had never been so creeped out in their entire lives.
Jason knocked on the door and said, “Faye? Who’s in there?” and he promptly heard the child go “Shhhh” and whisper something inaudible.
Richard pushed the door open and said that Faye was standing in the corner of the room, in the dark, facing the wall. She was standing up on her toes, dragging her hands and nails down the wall and talking to herself. With her back turned to the guys, she said, “Ohhh, their skin is so perfect, which one which one, put him down in the hole.”
Richard saw something out the window and hurried over to it. Jason stepped inside the room and reached out to put a hand on Faye’s shoulder, but she whirled around quickly and covered her face with her hands. Her eyes were open, which is unusual for her when she sleepwalks. Then, and these are the exact words Jason used,
“She started speaking in the voice of a little kid.”
She made whining and crying sounds, and rocked back and forth on her feet, cradling her arms as though she held a child. Then she turned around and started scratching at the wall again, still whispering in the kid’s voice, saying things like “It’s Faye. I can’t see you.
Are you up in the trees or down in the hole?” Then she started singing again.
Richard ran down the stairs and out the front door, barreling toward the tree line. From the window, he had seen a small child, walking around on its tippy toes, flailing its arms up in the air. On the phone he told me he could hear it singing while he watched it from the window. When Richard got about 20 yards away from the kid, it took off running on the balls of its feet, heading straight into the trees. Richard stayed in pursuit and went in after it. It was too dark for him to follow, and he lost the kid after a few moments. He wandered around for a few minutes, searching the area, and eventually heard the voice of an adult male.
Rich says he walked a few steps deeper into the grove and saw a huge man standing about 30 feet away, completely naked, looking up into the trees. There were lacerations or dark pockmarks of some sort all over his body. Now, Richard is about 6’1”, 210 pounds and bulky/muscular – and he said this dude was way bigger than him. He said the man was perfectly still for several seconds, but then started rolling his head around, cracking his neck loudly, and started making gurgling and mumbling sounds. I guess Rich was paralyzed with fear, because he claims he stood there for an entire minute or more before running like hell back to the house. As he turned to get out of there, the man let out a long “Heelllllllllooooooooooo?” and as he did, his voice transformed. It became my voice. Richard said that the thing in the woods called out with my voice several times as he fled, wailing “please help me” and “they’re gonna kill me tonight.”
Jason says that he did not hear or see anything out the window, only Richard running back inside, ghost-white with terror. He said Richard actually cried.
While they talked in the living room, Faye sat at the top of the stairs, just watching, wide awake, with a little smile on her face.
The next morning, they took her to her psychiatric appointment – the first she’s ever had – and I will hopefully hear back on that soon. It kills me that I’m not there with her now.
I’m still stuck at Pikes Peak. It’s like this place doesn’t want me to leave. The ranger station shut down the entire road network on the mountain because of the huge blizzard that rolled in, and there are avalanche warnings. My road out of here is completely iced over, and one part of it has a snow collapse/mini avalanche (shut up I’m from California, where God pays attention). I’m in contact with the ranger (his name is Greg, just like Faye’s dad, so that’s why I avoid referring him by name in these updates), and he assures me they’re working on getting the roads cleared every time it stops snowing. I missed my flight, but thankfully they gave me a voucher, so now I can just roll into the airport whenever I can.
I have enough food to feed an army, and the electricity here is surprisingly reliable, so I’m warm. The wifi dips out for 5-10 hours at a time, though. I’m working on Donkey Kong Country 2 and Secret of Mana on the SNES and writing about my experiences here in my spare time. I also slipped on the icy porch steps and fell on my side, so I’ve got an enormous bruise and it hurts like a bitch, but only when I breathe so I got that going for me.
A Redditor asked me if the cabin had a basement, and I had never thought to check.
Outside, under the snowpack, and halfway covered with old chopped wood, I found a little-locked door. The key was in the kitchen cupboard, and it turns out there’s a decent-sized cellar under the house. Down inside, I found a ton of creepy shit. There is a bundle of long, black hair, several dozen jars of some rotten, mutant-looking shit, and tons of old books from the 60’s and 70’s. And lots of porno magazines.
There are also lots of sticks and yarn. All of the material necessary to make a dreamcatcher like the one hanging at the tree line behind the cabin. I didn’t touch anything. I just noped straight out of there.
I’ve been thinking about something that another Redditor said to me the other day, which was “have you considered that it is not a dreamcatcher at all?” And he’s right. I’m not an expert on Native American symbology or artifacts. It just looks kind of like a dreamcatcher to me, so I’ve been calling it one all this time. Tiwe, the Pueblo friend of the ranger, didn’t call it that. He just said to leave it alone.
I’m wondering if that thing attracts the Impostor, instead of keeping it away.
It could mark the house. I kind of want to move it for one night, to see what happens. After all, Tiwe blessed the entire cabin, so I feel quite safe. And I have a .357 magnum in case leaves don’t protect me.
At about 9:30AM, there was a knock on the door. I grabbed the gun, suspecting another encounter with the Impostor. It was lightly snowing and gloomy, so I figured the sun was blocked enough that the creature would be willing to come out of the woods. But then I heard familiar voices, talking cheerfully. I looked out the window, and to my total surprise, it was Tiwe and his son Nathan! These badass motherfuckers had hiked up from the ranger’s station in the snow to check on me. I let them in and they made me tea. I cannot tell you how happy I was to see them.
Tiwe brought me his own dreamcatcher. It was one he made specifically for me, and he told me I should hang it beside the creepy one. It’s very colorful and ornate; I could tell he spent a lot of time on it. It’s even got two beautiful hawk feathers dangling off it, which Nathan says represent freedom and unboundedness. He reiterated the importance of finding the engagement ring Faye had lost and blessed the house again. I tried to get them to stay longer, but they had to get back down the mountain before the storm picked up, and told me I should come with them. We all knew I wouldn’t. If I left with them, I’d be leaving Greg’s truck, and I’d never have found what I came back for.
I said goodbye and Tiwe hugged me. I wish that guy was my grandpa.
I took a nap after they left. I figured out how to sleep without being interrupted by the god damn voices in the forest – from 6AM to 3PM, it’s pretty quiet outside, so I nap on and off. But something really bad happened this time. I woke up opening the bathroom window.
I’ve never sleepwalked before in my entire life. Faye’s been sleeping next to me for five years, and she says I don’t move, I don’t speak, I don’t snore, I don’t steal sheets. I’m the most polite bed-buddy on earth. But when I came to, I was standing next to the toilet, both hands prying the frozen window open. It was about 2 inches up, and the freezing cold wind on my fingers is what woke me up. I slammed it shut and checked all the windows, ensuring that they were locked and sealed tight, then went back to bed. I dragged one of the living room chairs into the bedroom with me and propped it against the door, so that I’d knock it over if I got up again.
This did not work. At around 1PM, I woke up standing at the front door, and found myself pulling it open. The loud groans it issued were what snapped me out of my stupor. I slammed the door shut and looked out the window next to it, praying nothing was out there waiting for me at the tree line. I saw nothing.
Then, I remembered that I’d had a dream. Images of a huge hole carved into mountain surfaced in my mind.
Snow and branches were caked all around the mouth of the entrance, and an impossible yawning blackness emanated from within. In the dream I just kind of stood there, gazing into the vacant face of the deep, listening to Faye’s weakened cries.
I sat down on the couch and just sort of cried for about a half hour. I thought about what our lives had become, and how bad I missed her. I thought about all of the dreams we have of our future, the things that can never be if I don’t figure out how to save her. I thought about all the promises I’ll never keep if I die up here.
I decided that it would be best to hang the dreamcatcher sooner rather than later, because the clouds broke for a while and it was fantastically bright out. I got geared up and trudged across the snow with Tiwe’s gift, and hung it on a branch about 3 feet away from the evil-looking one.
And that’s when I saw it. Faye’s engagement ring.
It was dangling there right in front of me, as if to tease me. Someone had woven it into the strings of the dreamcatcher.
I stood there for a long time, right between the two objects. I couldn’t figure out if some benevolent force was giving me a break, or if I was being taunted by whatever beings have haunted my footsteps ever since I arrived on the mountain. Retrieving the ring would require me to not only touch, but destroy, the creepy dreamcatcher. I had the thought to go ask NoSleep what I should do, but I feared that if I left even for one second, the ring would be gone when I got back. So I just tried to solve the riddle by myself. How I wish I’d brought the satellite phone out there with me. After a few minutes of standing there, I reasoned that Tiwe’s dreamcatcher would probably do just as well in protecting me, if in fact that was the function of the original one. I also figured that if it were cursed or something, touching it couldn’t actually be worse than leaving the ring there and allowing Faye to be completely consumed by her madness. If the ring has anything to do with the creatures who are controlling Faye and me while we sleep, then getting it back is a priority over not touching weird stuff in the woods.
So that’s what I did. I broke the brittle thing apart and took my god damn ring back. What else could I have done?
And, as if on cue, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.
It was a person, standing in the snow beside a tree, about twenty feet from my left side. I was so scared I didn’t look directly at him; I just watched him in my periphery and prayed he hadn’t noticed me. It was a man with black and gray hair and dark clothes, facing away from me. His head was tilted all the way back, and he was looking way up at the tops of the trees. His limbs looked mangled and bent and elongated, even without looking right at him. I slid the ring into my pocket as slowly as I could, trying not to make a sound, and as I did the man hobbled around and faced me. I really didn’t want to look now. I just slammed my eyes shut. I knew he was looking at me; I could feel his gaze on me. He started gurgling and making throaty noises, then said in a voice so threatening I can’t even begin to describe,
“Felix, I knoooow youuuu…Felix, I knoooow youuuuu….Felix, I knoooow youuuuu…” over and over. I took off running and screaming like a bat out of hell. I screamed all the way back to the fucking cabin. I barricaded the front door with the couch and burned up half the sage I had left. I even prayed. Like, an actual prayer. I haven’t done that since I was fifteen years old.
I’m really struggling to write this last part. It’s taken me hours to finish this entry because I keep getting up to distract myself.
The ranger isn’t answering his phone, and nobody’s at the station.
Maybe the power is out. I don’t know what I did by breaking that dreamcatcher, and I don’t know what tonight is going to be like. But Faye, if you ever read this, and if something happens to me, don’t forget. Your tenderness, your softened skin / all I needed / Your love is my tourniquet. : )
I have to say this even though I desperately want it not to be true.
The man I just saw was Tiwe.
Final Part: I Was Alone In The Cabin And Slept Off. When I Woke Up I Had An Arm Wrapped Around Me…
This story is published with permission from the author, Felix Blackwell and was first posted on Reddit.
Cover Image Source:Hauke Sandhaus