Before today, I had been a basket case crying myself to sleep every night since March 15th. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep without night terrors. In just one night: I lost everything, including my sanity. But today was different. Today I was finally given need-to-know information on exactly what it was that I found on Vinwood Road. The short version: I found “Vince.”
So imagine if you will, a bloated corpse of what we can only assume was once a white tailed deer lying on the road in front of your car or truck or whatever you drive. It was very late, and I was trying to get home before a bad ice storm hit. The weather forecast had made a point that all who were still at their jobs should consider camping on the lobby couch. I wasn’t going to do that, because I couldn’t just leave my dog home alone during an ice storm. I couldn’t turn back now. I had to get out of my nice warm car and get this thing off the road. It was a pretty large animal and I couldn’t get past it. As soon as I stepped out, the smell of it hit me; the thing was so bloated and rotten that within 30 feet the odor was unbearable. I definitely wasn’t going to run over it with my car; No amount of wash and wax would have gotten that smell out. My knock off Nikes offered no resistance to the elements; My feet were already wet and cold. Still I was careful not to slip and bust my ass on the portion of the road that had already iced over; Although I ended up doing just that. When I got home and stepped on my front porch my feet shot out from under me and I Damn near cracked my skull in half.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I guess that little detail would give you a good reason to assume that my experience could have been the result of a head injury. Unfortunately, “Vince” was very real to me. And I understand that you have absolutely no reason to believe a word that I say here, so I won’t ask you to believe my story. I just ask that you at least hear me out, because even now as I write from this disgusting motel, I still cannot make sense of it. I don’t know what the hell it was I encountered, and I’m not going to return to my home to find out. Maybe I did knock something loose when I hit my head. Maybe my Ex wife was right, and I really was going insane out there all alone in bumfuck Vinwood. It was a long stretch that was surrounded by forest every mile of the way. Vinwood was about 600 acres. A few dozen people lived out there. I was one of them. We had a decent sized park and there were a few underpaid rangers who acted as game warners and garbage men.
So I had to get out of my car and haul a dead animal off the road before I could pass. It took me a moment to work up the nerve. I zipped my jacket up (knowing that I was going to have to burn it when I got home.) and pulled the collar up over my nose and took a deep breath to hold for as long as I could.
I stood over it for a whole minute trying to figure what this thing was. It was big. It’s hard to describe it. It was some weird looking deer. It was soggy and wet. Seemed like It had been dead for a few days. The head was that of a decent 9 point buck; It would have been a hard pass for any big game hunter. But the rest of it was just this black furry body like a rug or a big coat made of old dirty animal fur. And the smell of this thing was making me nauseous. I tugged at it, and It felt like it was at least two hundred pounds. It took all of my strength just to budge it. Each time, I would drag the dirty filth (It was dead blood cells.) across the pavement like broad brush strokes on a canvas. It was common to find roadkill like dead deer in Vinwood. In the last few year I heard they had to start hiring more rangers for that very reason. Earlier that day my buddy Flint (who was a ranger.) was cleaning another dead deer off the side of the road. He complained saying that he’d been scraping deer off the road since that morning. He showed me the back of his truck and there were four dead deer including the one he had just picked up that had marks in their necks. I don’t know how common it is where you live to find dead deer one after the other just laying in the road, but neither of us had ever seen or heard of anything like that before. He told me that it was probably just a bad outbreak of blue tongue (that’s a parasitic disease that rots a deer’s brains right out of its skull.)
and that I should be careful and not touch the bodies with my bare hands.
I didn’t want to touch this one, but I didn’t have a choice. I cuffed my hands inside the sleeves of my jacket; though that still was probably not enough protection. I got winded and had to turn away from the corpse to catch my breath. The fabric of my jacket couldn’t even filter out the air well enough, as each breath carried that sickened odor of rotting flesh. Having this tainted air in my lungs made me feel even more nauseous. I caught my breath and looked to see if I had moved the thing enough to squeeze past it and I just needed another foot of space. I was starting to get really pissed off. Instead of tugging it again, I grabbed it by the antlers and pulled it as hard as I could. Then it was like the thing became a hundred pounds lighter as something pried loose. The antlers were still in my hands as I flung them up and away from the body. I just kind of stood there for a moment in both amazement, and disgust. There was no way this was really happening, I thought. The odor that I desperately tried to keep out of my lungs was not unlike dead leaves, at least compared to the real vile shit that was festering inside this thing. It was a sick vile bog that could only be writhed in by maggots hatched in the lowest pus spewing blood gullets of hell. I dropped the head before I was willing to admit to myself that that’s what it was, and I ran from that horrible smell, slipping on the ice every step of the way. My stomach turned harder than it ever turned in my entire life. I opened the car door and fell to my knees vomiting. At least I was able to get past it, only to then get home and have to pick myself up off my wet frozen porch.
That is a bad night for anyone. I was sick, cold, and now I had a severe headache. I was defeated. The day won. I was going to bed in this terrible state and there was nothing I could do about it. That was only two weeks ago when I could still sleep in my own bed, or sit in my big chair and kick back with some wine and either write in peace or fall asleep. I just want to go home. But, despite 2 weeks of hearing police sirens, domestic violence, drug deals and other messed up things all around my motel room every night: this is still a safer place than my home is right now.
At midnight, I almost always wake up to take a piss and I’ll usually let Baron out too. Baron was my dog. When I walked through the door that night, he was the only thing that made me feel better. He was so happy to see me. I was so tired that I just laid down on the floor while he licked my face. That was his way of cheering me up. He was a beautiful 5 year old labrador with a lot of energy. I fought tooth and nail to keep him during my divorce. I wasn’t going to let her or anyone else take him away from me. So like always, I went to the back door, unlatched the locks, opened it and he jets out in the backyard. In the summertime, I would usually go outside with him, but the storm was in full swing now. There wasn’t any snow, just ice. The trees were already completely crystallized. I was keeping an eye on this one old tree that was leaning hard towards my house. I’d been putting off cutting it down for years, and tonight I was nervous that the storm was going to finally make it fall. I told myself that if it didn’t fall and crush me tonight, that I’d get it done when the weather cleared up.
When I flushed the toilet, everything I had seen that night came flooding back. Traveling down Vinwood road, my jacket stained with blood, and holding that deer’s head in my hands.
The thought of the stench was enough to make me feel sick again. I found my bottle of Tums in the medicine cabinet to calm my stomach down, and tried not to think about it. I even sprayed air freshener in every room of my house because I couldn’t get that smell out of my nose.
Something weird had happened while I was in bathroom; the light above my back porch died. I didn’t feel like dealing with it, so I said screw it, and I’d fix it tomorrow.
I opened the backdoor and a breeze came in and crawled up my pajamas. Baron would usually come running in; He hated cold weather as much as I did. I whistled for him, but he didn’t come to me. I stood in the doorway and listened carefully for a moment, and all I heard was the wind chill pick up and fall again. I couldn’t see anything past my front porch; The storm had blackened the sky. Living out in the country away from town was nice, but it also felt eerie after dark. I never really got use to it, but, I never really felt alone or unsafe out there, just as long as Baron was with me. The wind fell down again, and this time it stayed down. The silence that fell with the wind turned the darkness beyond my porch into an abyss. If Baron was out there, I couldn’t have seen him with his dark brown coat. I should have been able to hear him as he scratched around the ice, or at least heard the sound of hot piss hitting the ground. Nothing.
What spooked me the most, was that Baron didn’t come to me when I called him. He was a well trained obedient dog and would always come to me. But there was something else: the longer I looked into the dark, the more I felt like something was looking back at me.
I couldn’t see it, but it could see me just fine. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I was able to make out a shape: It was on all fours, and I thought it was Baron for a moment, but it was bigger than he was and It just stood there.
I looked at it, and I looked at it, and I looked at it, and then It moved.
Baron emerged from the dark like it was another dimension; panting as he hopped up the porch, ran past me and laid back down on his doggy bed. I closed the door and latched the locks.
I bent over to pet him while he looked up at me and kept on panting like he was out of breath. He was fine. Maybe he had trouble getting to his usual spot to piss. I just went back to my bed and tried to get some sleep.
I woke up again at about three in the morning from Baron barking at something. That either meant he was about to have an accident, or that there was a stranger at the door. But this didn’t sound normal. It was vicious. Something had really upset him.
I stumbled into the kitchen half asleep, and Baron was just facing the back door like he was in a standoff. He was snarling with all of his K-9s in such a frightening way, I was scared to even touch him. I tried to see what it was that He just seemed to know was there. I usually kept the blinds closed over the window in the backdoor, with the way Baron was growling, I was getting scared myself. I opened one of the kitchen drawers and grabbed a cheap flashlight I kept around. I moved quietly to the backdoor so I wouldn’t scare off whatever it was. It could’ve been a raccoon or a fox; Baron had a particular vendetta against this one big tomcat that came around sometimes. But Baron never got this upset over a tomcat or just any animal. Something scared him. I turned the flashlight on in one hand, and grabbed the draw string with the other. I hesitated, because I anticipated seeing a twisted face looking through the window, or maybe Jason Voorhees would be standing there with a machete, and would kick the door down. I was starting to freak myself out, so I finally just yanked the string down and shined the light on the window.
Nothing.
It was just pitch black nothingness out there. I started to calm down, and so did Baron while I petted him. I was still so sick, and was so tired. All I needed was just a good night’s sleep. I wasn’t mad at Baron though. I just assumed that the storm picked back up and that the wind might have knocked a tree limb down on the roof and scared him. I patted him on his head and he finally relaxed. He went to the door and started whining the way he does when he needs to piss again. “Okay…last time for the night.” I said as I unlatched the locks and opened the backdoor. He jetted out past me, off the porch and into the dark again. I was already awake, so I figured I might as well change that busted light. I put the flashlight back in that same kitchen drawer and grabbed a new 100 watt bulb. It was still freezing cold with a terrible chill blowing, and the ice on the porch was freezing my slippers to the bottoms of my feet. Without letting the door shut, I unscrewed the blown bulb and screwed in the new one as the light came on. I went to turn, and out of nowhere, the smell of that rotten dead deer hit me in the face like I was back on Vinwood Road. This time it was worse. What the hell? I said to myself. Then I went to turn and slipped on the ice. I almost fell again before catching myself on the wood railing. Then a blistering cold wind picked up and came through so hard that it pulled the door closed hard enough to slam it shut. The storm just kept getting worse.
I called for Baron to get his ass back inside. Then I thought about locking him out for the night because it smelled like he must have pulled that stained jacket out of the dumpster. Probably why he didn’t come to me earlier, he was smelling that blood.
I turned the door knob and thankfully it wasn’t locked or jammed.
Then I thought, if that was the case, then wouldn’t Baron have reeked of that horrible odor earlier?
I saw myself in the reflection of the glass, and standing behind me past my right shoulder was a large black mass and big white eyes looking at me.
I was frozen. It was still very dark in my backyard, but I could barely make out the details of it. Those eyes gave it away, like it had finally got curious enough to get a closer look at me. I was too scared to move. Too scared to think. Seconds went by like minutes as everything I thought I knew about time ceased to make any sense at all. It was just standing there more still than I was. What the hell was it? and what was it doing? It was deathly quiet; I couldn’t hear it breathing or anything like that. It was big and tall, definitely taller than I was. I could make out what looked like tree branches coming out of its head. Then I realized they were antlers. This could not have been the same thing I pulled off the road, I thought. And those eyes stared at me wide and bright. Unblinking. Unflinching. Focused.
It might not have realized that I saw it in the glass and was following me inside, and It was just waiting for me to make a move.
Either way, It was plain dumb luck that that strong wind came through and pulled the door shut; maybe it was the only reason I am alive right now.
I had my hand on the doorknob and was getting ready to swing it open.
Get inside and slam it shut in the Thing’s face.
I counted to myself,
one…two…
and then I heard a whining from just behind me. I took my eyes off of it for a second, and I saw Baron crawling up the steps. His jaw was broken. And then I looked back at the window, and It was upon me.
I smashed my shoulder into the door and it flung open as I lurched myself through it and somehow got it back shut, and the locks latched.
I grabbed the biggest kitchen knife I owned before looking out the window again. Baron was looking at me through the window; looking to me for help.
It seemed like he didn’t know where he was. Like he was concussed. My heart ripped in half seeing him like that. I started to go back out there and get him…and then he was pulled off of the porch steps as he clawed into the wood.
There was no way that thing was just a glint in the glass or some hallucination from hitting my head. Hallucinations don’t smell like that, and they definitely don’t do that to dogs.
It just took Baron, right in front of my eyes.
The backyard was only slightly more illuminated from the porch light.
I backed away from the door, keeping my eyes on the window. Then the porch light went out again at the same time I heard the bulb break. It knew that I couldn’t see it as long as it was dark.
I was clinching the handle of the knife just waiting for It to break through the door. Then, If my luck wasn’t already bad enough, all the lights and electricity suddenly shut off. The storm must have knocked it out. Or maybe somehow that thing did it. I don’t know for sure. I did my best to not panic while I felt my way around in the dark. I got a flashlight on and I turned to go down the hall and into my bedroom. I grabbed my emergency bag that had a change of clothes and some other things. I got dressed and grabbed the car keys and I slipped the kitchen knife under my belt. I cracked the front door and peeked out, looking for those eyes somewhere in the dark. The coast seemed clear and I ran through the ice storm.
I got to my car and cranked it on. But I couldn’t leave yet. I rolled the car window down and called for Baron, but I was ready to floor it if that thing came running from around the house instead. I was terrified, and I was just about to give up. I thought about just coming back with the Cops and that that would be the best thing to do. Then I heard Baron yelping like he was in pain. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t leaving him here to die.
I got out of the car and ran as fast as I could back to the house, Yelling at the top of my lungs for him to run away from it. His yelps turned into screams of pure agony. I screamed as hard as I could at whatever that goddamn thing was, “LEAVE MY DOG ALONE YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
The whole time, the wind was blowing hard and I was also hearing loud cracking sounds. I got back inside the front door and closed it behind me. I shined my light, and saw something new. The back door was open. It looked like it had been kicked open. I pulled the knife from my belt and held it up ready to stab anything that came near. I smelled that familiar stink. That thing definitely came inside my house, and I could see the other side of the backdoor was dirty from where It broke in.
I quietly stepped through my living room heading to the kitchen, whispering for Baron the whole time. I got to the kitchen and realized it was the same dead blood and filth from the Road, smeared all over the door.
I remember that very well. In time, I like to think that I will get over many of the things I saw that night with enough therapy and meds. But I know that that’s not possible anymore. What I found lying in the darkness beyond my back porch, was something that I will never, ever, be able to unsee. I tried to forget. I tried so hard to forget. But I can’t. And maybe now, I shouldn’t.
Broken glass crackled under my shoes as I stepped through the doorway. I turned my flashlight on and saw that the new bulb was shattered, and the screw in part was still in the socket. I shined the light in the backyard, and I didn’t see any immediate danger. I had to find Baron. So I stepped out further, and then that cheap flashlight went out. I stood petrified. I couldn’t see two feet in front of my face. The freezing cold wind settled once more into a silence, and for a moment, it was like I didn’t exist anymore. And you know, that has to be what Hell itself is like; just trapped in suspended terror as your loudest most tortured screams reach no one. And you stay like this, forever.
I held the knife high over my head the whole time, stumbling through the dark. Then it dawned on me that despite not having a good signal to call for help, I realized the light of my phone would still work. I pulled it from my pocket and as I turned the led light on, the ice storm picked up fast and brought with it the hardest and most freezing cold wind yet. It was so strong it nearly blew me away as I fell to the ground. I heard something snap really loud and looked all around me with the phone light, and I was ready to stab at anything. And then right in front of me, it was that old tree toppling over onto my house. It crashed right through my bedroom. Ice came raining down all over me as I covered my eyes, and all I could hear was the wind screaming through the woods all around me. It was deafening. I felt I was going insane. I had to get out of there. I crawled on all fours, until I found the steps going up the porch. But then, next to it, was something that I failed to see before, lying on the icey wet ground. It was Baron.
I cannot describe here exactly what was done to him, because one: I doubt that there is any (none darkweb) blog or forum that would allow it.
And two: you really, really, don’t want to know.
I don’t remember much after that.
I was told that when they found me, I was parked somewhere out on the side of Vinwood Road unconscious, clutching a kitchen knife, and covered in mud and something else…
I spent maybe a day in the hospital
I was told that my house had suffered serious damage from the storm. I told them what happened, but they insisted that I had suffered a head injury from the tree falling into my bedroom and that I was so out of it that I tried to drive myself to the hospital, but didn’t make it before passing out. And despite telling them where to look, they couldn’t find Baron’s body.
I was released from the hospital and I had my sister drive me to a motel. She wanted me to come stay with her, but I insisted that I just wanted to be alone right now. That was two weeks ago.
Yesterday I talked to Flint on the phone, and asked him if he would go to my house and take another look around and see if he could find Baron’s body.
I didn’t hear from him until this morning when he showed up to my motel room. He told me he didn’t find Baron or anything else. He gave me his condolences and was about to leave. I asked him if this had anything to do with those deer.
He stopped and took a long breath. Then he said that he wasn’t allowed to show me this, but I deserved to know.
He pulled his phone out and showed me pictures of what looked to be dead deer.
He said that his higher ups told his station to try to keep things quiet. He said that none of the dead deer they had found died of blue tongue; they had all been killed by strangulation or blunt trauma to the head. In the pictures, most of the deer looked like the ones I saw in the back of his truck that just had marks around their necks. But then a few of them looked like they had been partially devoured at the throat. And then one of them had been decapitated. We don’t have predators like Bears around these parts, and it wasn’t legal to hunt game in Vinwood either. Even more, he said there had been 23 animals found dead in Vinwood within the last 2 weeks alone. Mostly deer, a few foxes, some cats, and even stray dogs. All of which were found in varying conditions. Then he said that the description I gave of Baron’s body matched the conditions of the stray dogs.
As he said that, I could smell that Thing again like it was in the room with us. Then I realized it was coming from him. He reeked of it. He wasn’t lying; he saw it too.
I was shaking. I spent weeks living in this motel like it was a padded cell in an insane asylum. Finally it was Flint who confirmed my sanity, that there is something out there in Vinwood. I knew that he couldn’t say what. But it was real. That night I found it on the road. Then it followed me home. It tried to kill me. And then what it did to Baron…
I told him how I found it in the middle of Vinwood Road. I told him everything. He looked at me with a befuddled expression, and he said that he couldn’t believe that I was alive.
“I thought it was dead. I pulled its rotten head off.”
Then he said, “No, that wasn’t his…It’s head. You see, It likes to wear the deer. Typically the antlered bucks.” He seemed so repulsed just thinking about it. He had seen more than what I had.
“Flint, you saw it didn’t you…you knew that it was out there, and you still let me drive home…How could you not tell me?”
“Hey I didn’t know what the hell it was. I don’t know what it is now. And I could lose my job for just telling you that!”
“You called it, ‘He’…so what is He?”
He just looked down, unable to look me in the eyes anymore.
“Flint…”
He turned to leave again.
“What about the stray dogs? He did the same thing to them that he did to Baron. Why did he do that to my dog?”
He opened the door and stepped out.
“Flint!”
He turned around and finally looked me in the eyes and said this as he closed the door,
“My guess…He likes dogs in a worse way.”
Before I settled down to write this post, I made a few phone calls to my neighbors on Vinwood Road. Our houses weren’t very close, but it’s possible they might have seen or heard something.
Mrs. Temple was the only one that answered. She was very old, and lived alone. Sometimes I’d take her some food whenever I had leftovers. Despite her age she was still pretty coherent and friendly. I asked her if She had seen or heard anything weird around her house within the last few weeks.
and she said this,
“Oh, well…now that you mention it, there’s been this real tall fella coming around here sometimes. Ye, he gets in my trash and I have to get my son out here to clean up…and then uh sometimes the fella would get to lookin through my window…last time I think I’d seen him…the last time was about a couple of weeks ago…He were carrying something…like a dog or something. Didn’t you have a dog, Brandon?
Well hell Anyway…I would come out here on the porch with Harold’s old Remington, and I’d tell him to get on away from here and usually He’d go away…and uh…but then uh sometimes He wouldn’t go away. He’d just take to staring at me…he’s got some big ol’ eyes…Ye but, i was talkin to Tammy, talked to her yesterday morning, tellin her about it, and she got to talkin…saying, ye that’s just Ol’ Vince, just stay inside and he’ll eventually wander off…he ain’t not harm.”
“Vince?”
“Ye, that’s what she took to callin him. Ya know Tammy, who lives with her husband up on the ridge? Ye, she’d been seeing him too. Longer than I’d been. Heard her refer to em as Vince more than a few times. Ain’t too sure as to what that infers, and I ain’t too sure that I want to know more bout it than that.”
I’m glad that I called Mrs. Temple. I also got her son’s number and texted him that he might want to get his mother out of Vinwood for a while.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll pay a visit to Tammy Arnolds. I didn’t know her very well, but she had apparently seen enough of “Vince” to give It a name.
And If the rangers won’t do anything about “Vince” then I will.
For Baron…
If anyone reads this: Thank you for listening.
I will give an update as soon as I can.
Wish me luck tomorrow, because I’m heading back to Vinwood Road.
God help me.