Simon here, again.

She's gone.

http://oldcelluloid.blogspot.com/2011/05/karis-disappeared.html

Night

It's worst at night. Because you can't know he's out there. Night vision mode on the cameras only does so much. I get scared near windows, worried that out of the corner of my eye I'll spot movement. Quick. Silent. I know in my head that there's no way he found us this quickly, that no ordinary man could have tracked us down here. The sighting must have been a false alarm. But it's dark, and it's cold, and it's always worst at night.

Alert

About two hours ago, one of the guards has called in a tentative first sighting. While patrolling, he could have sworn he saw a tall, thin man in dark clothes standing between some trees about 100 meters away, watching. It didn't register immediately, and by the time of the double-take, he was gone again. The guards swept the whole area. This was all about five hundred meters away from the house. Couldn't find anything. Not even tracks. Here in the house, everything's on high alert. Initially, we were ushered into a safe room, but we've been allowed out now. Assuming it was a false alarm. If you're wanting to see something for hours on end, you'll probably see it. Still, no-one's letting that assumption get in the way of their readiness. The threat has come not as soon as we were prepared for, but much, much sooner than we expected. All the police in the house are tense, their guns always in their hands. There're questions to be asked - how'll he find us, will he be armed, is he a proper threat - but no-one's asking them. Not sure if the answers are things they'll want to hear. Just assume he will find us, he will be armed, and he is a threat. The ifs and hows can wait. I'm less on edge - antivirals, antihistamines and the steady numb of sleep deprivation have made me drowsy, distancing me from the panic.

I hope it was a false alarm. I don't want to believe that someone wants to kill me so bad they'd wade into the middle of this just to do so. But it's an odd feeling knowing someone is coming for you, determined to kill you. Someone who might not even be human. All these people here to stop that, all this money and time. I try not to think about all the people who were there to stop Joey getting taken.

False Reassurance

The firearms team here aren't here for the long run. They're assuming that, in spite of the changing cars and the fake license plates and the stop off in a town to throw our pace off, Daddy will find us, and he'll do so quickly. They know the cameras won't work, and they've seen what he does to his victims. They're not scared, I don't think, but they're not looking forward to this. He's just a man, they tell themselves, he's just a man. Here's hoping. Bullets can hit a man. Bullets can stop a man.

This would be quite a nice house, under normal circumstances. It's at the midpoint of a long detour road going through the wood, like the centre-line of an H. Two thirds of a mile of road either way, and a mile of forest in every direction. Police campouts throughout, with a camera network informing every one of them. They're all heavily armed. The manpower here is incredible, but when you consider the publicity these murders have been receiving nationally, it makes a little more sense. The police forces of increasingly large areas are looking like idiots, and they are really disliking being made a fool of by whatever person or people are behind Daddy. Rather looking forward to filling them with holes.

The house itself has three out of five bedrooms taken up by police, sleeping on the floor two-to-a-room. Monitors of the security cameras in every room, wires trailing everywhere. My family and I are forced into the smallest possible space. Nadine and I are sharing a room for the first time ever. She cries all through the night. This Daddy affair is hurting everyone. Spoiling the lives of everyone it touches. And it's my fault that my family's been exposed to it.

Simon and I have barely been off the phone, I don't know why I'm still having to vent to you guys. I just feel powerless against this overwhelming malevolent presence. It wears a girl down.

The paranoia. The disgust. The relentless horror. I feel like there's less and less of me.

Migration

They've set somewhere up for us. Deep into the Shire counties. Not going to say which one, but yeah; away from cities, in the country areas. Changing cars regularly, unmarked license plates. We'll be taken to a house in the middle of the woods, full of police, armed and equipped. Camera perimeter, motion detectors. The police have attained special permission  to be armed with submachine guns, body armour, night vision goggles. They let me hold one. The Heckler and Koch MP7, they called it. It was heavy. Looked like it should be attached to a lightgun game in an arcade. Several trained police guards, each with one of these, is being put up against a tall bald man. Why am I not more confident?

I haven't shared my suspicions about him being something...not entirely human. My sister, Nadine, won't stop crying. She's eleven, but even now fear is overcoming her. We haven't told her about exactly what's going on, but she knows that whatever did that to Ms. Fisher, and her boyfriend, and Joey, well he's coming after us, and our attempts to run are failing. We're still in the waiting room of the local police station, like we have been for days now. She's lying across hard plastic chairs, her head on my mother's lap. My mother's stroking her head, desperately trying to reassure her that it's all going to be okay. My dad's been staring at the vending machine for twenty minutes. He can't even look at us anymore. Stir craziness set in a long time ago. The police went to get our stuff; we didn't even have a chance to unpack most of it. But I don't feel like doing anything, like I have no agency. In my lap I have Simon's copy of House of Leaves, open to some random page. The colour version, the one you can't get in Europe. A book about being stalked by a nameless horror as paranoia slowly envelops you? You see why I'm not in storytime mood.

I don't even know why I'm keeping this blog anymore. I guess I need somewhere to vent, and the knowledge that there are people out there who care about me. I looked back over the old entries. Interning at Motcombe seems like a lifetime past. I find myself feeling nostalgic for three months ago. I'm at a loss to explain why all this is happening. Did I deserve this? Did I bring this upon myself? Why did everything have to get so fucking fucked up? There doesn't seem to be a reason. It's just arbitrary, and yet it's derailed my life and the life of my family. I have been made prey; something to be devoured. My mindset is shaky, my nerves brittle. I think of Daddy less and less as a person these days. He's a force, a presence, far more than a man. My would be killer has, in my mind, become a monster, his form black and swirling, writhing, chaotic, and at times I find my will to live draining like warm water in a basin, leaving only an exposed cold, when I think of him.

I've been trying to occupy myself with memories of before all this. Lying in bed with Simon. Hanging out with my friends, eating with my family round the table as we talk about all the nothings we did that day. They seem like things I saw in a photograph once. My life is fear and disgust and paranoia...and something else, lingering in the back of my skull like an ache itch, that I can't quite put my finger on.

"Then for an instant, feeling stripped and bare, I teeter on an invisible line suspended between something terrible and something terribly sad."

I've looked down at the book. I've been letting tears drip-drop down onto it for about five minutes now. Simon's going to be so pissed the next time I see him. He's going to remind me that he doesn't pop over to Canada and happen upon copies of this book every other day, then he'll complain for a while. I wonder, almost idly, if I'm going to see him again. Not when, if. Not "when I'm reunited with the person I love more than anyone, who I sometimes dream about being with for the rest of my life, he a journalist or writer or film critic, me a teacher, as we grow older and raise a family and watch it grow and - " but if. I don't think about "if not." I've never felt like this before. No belief - none at all - that things will get better. A faint hope, but no actual conviction that it will do so. No optimism left in me. I believed that the world was a beautiful, harmonious place, where good ultimately triumphs. I don't any more. And it hurts.

That's enough from me. I just need to get my thoughts out of my head. Anti-viral medication time. We're going soon. I now leave you with a quote from a classic book. Go educate yourselves.

"The truth of the matter, I sometimes thought, was not so much that I wanted to die, as that I no longer wanted to go on living in my present manner." - Alberto Monrovia, Boredom

Rough morning

First off, never admit to being willing to consider supernatural options in any question you're considering on the internet. You have NO IDEA the kind of crazy-ass shit you'll get in your inbox. I've had one or two guys trying to convince me that this is the Devil, sent to Earth to punish me for reading "The God Delusion", one guy trying to convince me that it's a manifested fictional monster who - according to this guy - gets confused if you're more than 8 feet from the ground, or wearing a mask, and one guy who devoted four of five messages to trying to convince me he's a government experiment being let loose on an urban population to test his warfare applications. It would appear that being willing to consider something that's supernatural attracts people who are willing to consider anything that's supernatural. Or maybe I'm just too damn drilled with scientific rigor and scepticism (lies: there's no such thing as being too damn drilled with scientific rigor and scepticism). I mean, I'm looking for something just on the edges of human understanding and I'm getting stuff from people who seem to just believe anything from Coast To Coast AM. I guess when you compromise your rationality, all bets are off. All myths are true, anyone?

Feeling like crap right now. Still sleeping in chairs in the police department. No-one knows what to do with us. And I've gotten ill somehow. The police doctor says the symptoms aren't of exhaustion from lack of sleep, but rather a really late-season flu. He's given me antivirals, which is a first. Remember all that mention of how I get sick a lot? This is partly the kind of thing I'm talking about (The chronic conditions are, if nothing else, easier to manage.) Only I could get flu, in May, while being chased across the country by a serial killer who may not be human. Oy.

My family's getting increasingly irate. My dad can't work, my mum can't work, my little sister can't go see her friends, and the thing that stopped them doing these things didn't even keep them safe like it was meant to. I think they've found themselves blaming me, which sucks.

Also, I have to write all this on my smartphone, just to keep you guys updated. I hope you're grateful...

Neccesary update

I'm fine. Just to get that out of the way. Daddy just stood there. Watching. When the police arrived, we ran out of the house and into their cars and they whisked us away. We slept at the station.

I have some stuff to say.

Last night changed a lot for me, because it forced me to come to a conclusion I never thought I would. You see, assuming Daddy was just some serial murderer was easy, but it ignored so much. The strange dimensions. The headaches. The fact that it seems like I had dreams about this whole thing before it happened. And our inability to stop him using methods that, to anyone else, would be beyond beatable. The distortion in videos, despite comparative clarity with photographs.

Whatever Daddy is, I don't think he's something that modern science knows about. I don't think he's human. I don't know what he is, and this far outside of my comfort zone, I refuse to speculate, but that's a conclusion I've been forced to come to. I know it sounds crazy; hell, right now it seems like you'd have reason to assume I AM crazy. But whatever Daddy is, he's not something DCI. Duncan or any other damn detective is equipped to handle. He's something else. God only knows what. Alien? Some kind of monster?

Christ, listen to me. I sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist ranting about men in black. I just...I can't come up with a conventional explaination which fits what's going on here.

He's here. He's outside. He's in our back garden. I've just called the police, they're on their way. God only knows how he followed us all the way here, but he's here. And there's something wrong with his arms. Jesus, his arms. I thought he was holding something but I kept looking even though I thought he'd see me and even though I don't know whether or not he did and the more I looked the more and more I thought that his arms were long enough to touch the ground, just like his victims, and he's thin. He's too thin. He's thin and tall and with long, thin arms and no face. He doesn't have a face. No face at all. He's tall. He's taller than the six and a half foot fence around the back garden that he's standing into, staring up at the house. I don't know if the police will be here in time. Oh God, this is the first time I've seen him with my own eyes, that I'm not too pissed to remember. My head hurts and he's here and I don't know if I'll ever write anything ever again. I love you Simon. I love you Mum. I love you Dad. I love you Laura. I love all of you. Just...I hope that this isn't the last time I get to tell you this.

Please don't let me end up like the others.

Phonecalls

I got two phone calls today. One was from Simon. The other, from DCI. Duncan. Apparently, in my absence, absolutely nothing new has happened. No sightings, no new disappearances. They're currently stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they've got a dead teacher, a dead architect and a dead seven year old, and they want to bring the culprit down, but on the other, they have no leads, and anyone who's spent any major amount of time looking at the photographs has mysteriously fallen ill. All claiming, surprise surprise, headaches. The headaches have defied explanation, but it's affecting more and more people. I haven't had any in a while.

Okay, there're something I didn't tell you about that night. Up in Ms. Fisher's flat. While you know how she died, and what had been done to her from the newspaper article about Joey, there was one thing I hid. The look on her face. I don't know how I'd expect someone's face to look having had that done to her, but it wasn't like this. Her face had a look of the most abject horror, like everything she wished she would never lay eyes on was advancing upon her. It's quite a fear, that. Not just to be scared of the unknown. Not just to be scared of something that startles you. But the long, all-consuming dread of being trapped with something beyond your most frenzied, wild nightmares as it bears down upon you. Past screaming. Past crying. Nothing but horror.

That's what Daddy was.

No wonder I can't sleep.

Not for days.

Insomnia

It's black and I'm lonely
Oh if I could only get some sleep
Creaking noises make my skin creep
I need to get some sleep
I can't get no sleep

New everything is still dull. Maybe safer, but it doesn't feel like it. Still paranoid. Still shaking at every noise and movement anyone makes. Sitting at home watching the tiny TV in the relocation home, or on my laptop on TVTropes. Got onto the Nothing Is Scarier pages. That was probably a bad idea. Now I'm lying here, on my laptop, listening to Have A Nice Life. At least that's good.

I hate my life so much right now.

Purgatory-esque

There's NOTHING here. I've been walking around this area for hours. Nothing over 40 years old exists here except maybe the trees. All made-to-order housing estates for the sort-of-well-off and council housing. Small smatterings of franchised shops. Groups of kids who look like they want to stab me for wearing a Depeche Mode t-shirt, all with haircuts copied from footballers and tracksuit tops. Am I really so middle-class that kids who are clearly working-class actively scare me just by their presence? (I should never have watched Eden Lake with Simon) There's a park nearby, but - well, I can't deal with parks right now. News of Joey's death is still ringing in my ears.

To tell you the truth, I'm still reeling from Ms. Fisher's death, and her boyfriend's death, and the knowlege that I'm being stalked by the man who did it. These days, I wake up throughout the night just...screaming. Screaming and weeping. Eventually I cry myself to sleep, hating myself for being so weak. I alternate between having to sleep in the dark and needing the hall light on. When it's dark, it's too impenetrable, but when it's light, the shadows are too pronounced. Sometimes I'll want dark. Sometimes I'll want not so dark. Sometimes I just don't sleep. Being relocated hasn't changed that.

There's nothing to do here. I wish I could live over the internet. It's so much less lonely. There's always new people. But even that's sad. The worlds our minds inhabit since the internet and videogames and home film have become so much larger, but the physical one has become smaller. The known and the unknown both become larger, more intimidating.

I need happy stories. If anyone has any nice stories of things that're going on in their lives, please post them in the comments. I could use the pick-me-up.

Escape

My family and I are now in witness protection. I'm not going to tell you my new name or where I am, but we're far away. My internet connection is being routed through a proxy server in our old house (under police supervision - no piracy or, I dunno, ordering murders over the internet for me) because apparently in this age of social networking sites, it's better to continue with my old things than make new ones and have someone pick up on stylistic similarities. As long as I don't mention my new name and where I am. In the meantime...let's say that Daddy would be well-advised to not try and check out the house. I hope he does, so that I can come home.

I've broken up with Simon. Well, we're giving it a rest. Whether it's my having to move away, or his...incessant desire to share deeply private elements of my own trauma throughout this whole ordeal, I think it's best we have a break. I don't know whether or not I'm going back to him. I mean, I get that his blog is his place to get his emotions down (well, it's meant to be a film blog, but I guess that's gone out of the window) but there are some things I SPECIFICALLY ASKED HIM NOT TO SHARE. Namely, my fucking breakdown when that monster showed up practically in my back garden, and telling everyone who reads his blog about how I didn't care that Joey was missing as long as my ass was safer. That last one does sting more now. Either way, while I do love him, I just don't trust him anymore, and he simply doesn't respect me. Maybe I'll have a different perspective when I get back.

Anyway, I guess after all this time being stalked by some kind of serial killer, followed by whisking me halfway across the country into a new, creepily well-prepared house for me and my family, I'm expected to feel a little back in my shell. But I don't feel any less on edge than I did back in Eastbourne. I can't relax, or get it into my head that there's no way he could find us. I get staying a little highly strung, but I'm wound so damn tight...

Ugh. Anyway, I guess I'm going to go job-hunting tomorrow. I need some way to meet people while I'm here. Feeling isolated. All alone with my thoughts. It doesn't help my outlook. The world seems darker, scarier. It always feels like something could creep into the corner of my vision at any moment. I'm still scared to look out of windows. Just in case.

Goddamn it.

This article just went up on the local newspaper's website. I can't screenshot it like Simon, so I'm just going to copy and paste the article.

"In the third murder attributed to what some are calling the Bourne Butcher, the body of seven year old Joseph Walker has been found in Gilderedge Park, Eastbourne. In a similar fashion to his teacher, Louise Fisher, who was murdered almost a month ago, Walker appears to have had his chest cavity opened, his internal organs removed, and placed around the body. Early reports also suggest that, like Louise Fisher, his limbs seem to have been stretched significantly.

His body was found on a small stone table in a secluded area of the park, where it was discovered by a late night jogger. Walker had been missing for over a week, having been kidnappend from his family home on the night of Sunday 24th.

This tragedy only confirms suspicions voiced by critics that the real killer was still at large and that former sex offender John Halderman was not the perpetrator, as he was in police custody during the estimated time of death.

According to police sources, the East Sussex police are shifting their attention to protecting the classroom assistant who found the body of Louise Fisher, as she has reportedly been the target of several threats from a man fitting the description of the suspect. Why this was not taken note of before, allowing for the freeing of John Halderman, has not been commented upon."

I think I'm going to be sick.

Great day today. Everything's fine.

Distrust

Just got off the phone with DCI. Duncan. The son of a bitch doesn't believe me. He has explaination after explaination as to why what's in those photos isn't real. I'm paranoid. I'm seeing things. I photoshopped them to get attention. I'm suffering from Survivor's Guilt. PTSD. He accepts that Halderman can't be the only one behind Daddy's crimes, but he's not paying attention to what, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty persuasive proof that he wasn't even involved - two tall, thin, bald men, working together? Do they have a union or something? He just wants to believe that he solved the case - with my help, he is quick to remind me. It's hard to tell whether it's his ego refusing to take a dent, or denial of the idea that Daddy is still walking around, free as a pretty bird in the spring.

So I'm alone. No police protection for me or Simon, even though this fucker was right outside his house, looking in. I haven't been to Simon's since Thursday. Haven't left my room in days. Drawing deeper and deeper inside myself. Sleeping with the lights on. Sleeping less. Not sleeping, sometimes. Jumping every time the house settles or the wind blows. every time I close my eyes, I'm scared, because i don't know what'll be there when I open them. Maybe I am paranoid, but that doesn't mean that there isn't someone after me. I have photographic proof. I've got a friend, Laura, coming back down from University to stay with me. She arrives later today. I'll try and keep my...issues under wraps until then. I still have no reason to believe Daddy knows where I live. No headaches in a while though.

That's something.

Tell me I'm seeing things

I found these on my phone. They're from Wednesday night, while I was drunk, at about 2:30 in the morning. The latter was taken near Simon's house. The former was taken inside, from an upstairs window. Click to enlarge. You'll see what I mean.

Please let me be wrong. Please.

EDIT: Just realised. These photographs aren't giving me headaches. If your head hurts after looking at this, get in touch, but otherwise, that's an interesting little discovery.