I’ve experienced what I thought were mysterious time-skips or blackouts twice now. Now I’m aware of the frightening reality of what caused them. Both times, it happened at the same location – the car park next to where I attend acting classes. On both occasions, I was responsible for locking up. The car park is right next to the building, so it takes hardly a minute to walk from the doors to the carpark.
The first time (Friday the 23rd), I thought I’d just misread the time I’d locked the doors – I thought I’d locked them at 8 pm, but it was 8:21 pm by the time I got to my car, quite strange, but perhaps I’d locked the doors at around 8:20 pm instead. One curious detail that would not be resolved by this theory was the sudden appearance of tears in my eyes and on my cheeks out of thin air (tears I had no recollection of shedding). But hey, maybe I was simply too tired and distracted to feel them fill my eyes and run down my cheeks. Being a self-proclaimed “rational” and relatively normal 21-year old law student and amateur actress with no history of physical or mental illness, I saw no reason to believe that I’d had a temporary loss of consciousness or any such thing, let alone something potentially paranormal.
It was the second time (Monday, the 26th) that started to freak me out – this time, I was 100% confident that I’d locked the doors at 7:54 pm – I even had a time-stamped message that I’d sent my sister immediately after I locked the doors as proof. However, I needed neither that nor to even look at the time to realise something was wrong. I felt a familiar, and in this situation, unwelcome wet sensation in my eyes and on my face – more tears that I had zero memory of shedding. Starting to panic, I pulled out my phone, and my face turned deathly pale when I looked at the time – 8:08 pm. 14 minutes of my life – gone, just like that. The only pieces of physical evidence I possessed to show those minutes had even happened was the text I’d sent my sister and the inexplicable tears on my face which were now mingling with fresh tears of fear that were slowly seeping out of my eyes.
What was happening to me? Had I blacked out? Was I losing my mind? Or was the fabric of time itself breaking, and I was just getting caught up in its ravages? I needed an explanation. As I pondered these questions, wiping away the tears that were still streaming down my face, I noticed that the shop overlooking the car park had a CCTV camera, and an idea popped up in my head – surely whatever had happened in those 14 minutes (and 21 minutes on Friday) would have been caught on camera? The recordings could shed the light I so desperately needed on my situation.
I went first thing on Tuesday morning to the shop and asked to see the CCTV footage from the night before. I had to lie that it was to figure out who had rear-ended my car. The employee who spoke to me took me to the security office and left me to browse through the computer to find the footage I needed. I thanked him and began searching, and found one from around the time the time-jump had happened. I fast-forwarded the footage, and got to the point where I could see other students leaving the building, and then finally I appeared, locking up the doors. Then, as I was walking to my car, I saw this hooded figure (definitely a male given I could see some facial hair and he was quite large) approaching me out of the nearby bush.
I could see that I had a brief conversation with the hooded figure, almost as if I knew him. Then, I tried to walk away from him. This seemed to aggravate him, and he blocked my path. Then, he stared into my eyes and said something. My demeanour in the footage completely changed – I became calm, and while the footage wasn’t of the greatest quality, I could make out a slight sparkle in my eyes – caused most likely by my eyes beginning to water. The hooded figure stood there ominously, appearing to watch me for a little while. Then, he began to touch my face, as if he was wiping my tears. What was happening? As I kept watching, my uneasiness grew by the second. Then, all of a sudden, he started to kiss, or more like, lick, my face, as if he was drinking my tears. I felt like I wanted to throw up – watching a footage of yourself with a random stranger licking tears off your face, it grosses me out to even type that!
I watched in horror and disgust as this went on for almost 15 minutes (I fast-forwarded the footage). I felt violated, and while I wanted to cry in response, I held back tears as the prospect of some weirdo drinking my tears and worse, making me forget about it, served to block my tear glands. At the end of the footage, the hooded figure whispered something into my ears and sped away at an inhuman speed, and seconds later, in the footage, I pulled out my phone to check the time (which I remembered doing). The speed at which he had taken off rattled me – was he even human? I wanted to check out the footage from Friday night as well, but just as I found the file, I heard the employee call out asking me if I had found what I was looking for. So, I quickly copied the two files on a USB drive and told him that I had indeed found the desired footage, thanked him, and left.
As I went home and tried to process these events – the time-jumps, the buckets of tears, both caused by a potentially paranormal entity that appears to be able to mind-control me into shedding tears for it to drink and then making me forget and disappear before I could know what had happened – all I could do was shudder. I thought hard about why this man, this creature, whatever he or it was, would target me. I had a brainwave as I recalled that on Friday, I’d performed a dramatic monologue at acting class that involved me shedding tears. What if this thing was a fellow acting student who’d seen my tears and thought, “Looks delicious”, and had targeted me after class? It seemed to be a plausible explanation. Either way, I don’t want to risk going back to that acting school again – and given the things that have transpired, I don’t think I even want to act anymore.
Thankfully, nothing has happened since Monday. However, I remain terrified by the incident, and knowing that there’s someone or something out there that’s interested in making me cry, drinking my tears, erasing my memory, and who knows what else, I haven’t left my house all week and have been doing my law classes online. But worst of all – I’ve been too afraid to cry – I really want to, I’ve always been a crybaby, and if there’s any experience that demands tears be shed in response, it’s my current predicament, and yet, it’s the same predicament that’s left me unable, unwilling, to shed tears knowing the horrors of the existence of some strange tear-drinking creature that’s out there waiting to prey on my vulnerability. Is that thing that drank my tears the only one? Or are there more? I’m not keen on finding out.