I’m sorry if this comes out incomprehensible, I don’t know how long it’ll take for it to find me. I’m not sure if it can find me even. It’s level of sentience is confusing, but I need someone else to know this, in case it comes after me.
My name is Walter Van Dale. I’ve been a part of reddit for a little bit, not too long. I mostly use it just to find out how to do something, like embroider or such. I like writing. I don’t like reading other peoples writings quite as much, but I like writing. Some months ago, I wrote a horror story. You can scroll down on my profile and find it. It was a funny little Lovecraftian-wannabe cosmic horror. I liked writing it, liked even more the reception it had. But I swear, it did something to me.
You know the placebo effect? You believe something good will happen from an action, and that makes it have a positive effect, even if the action or product itself doesn’t really do anything, but your mind believes it does, and so it reacts accordingly? I feel like I’ve been going through something similar, but this time it’s the entire world doing it.
I currently live in a northern part of Europe, but I’m originally from the South. I’m not too used to cold and early darkness. I was a bit scared it’d have a really bad effect on my mental health, since I’m not used to it. But since I came here it has never been a degree Celsius below 8, and the days got longer. I thought maybe it was luck, maybe I moved here at the right time to start getting Spring. But it got weirder.
I live pretty far from where I study. It isn’t too far, all things considered, but I need to ride a bike for about an hour to get to my university, and another hour to go back home. It’s a nice ride, except for one specific part of the ride, where I need to go through a really busy car road. In the South, riding past it would be a death wish, but here it’s a normal thing to do. But you can’t kill years of instinct out of me in days, so I keep waiting till the road is completely free as far as I can see before I pass. I need to wait a good while, and kept complaining to myself as I went home of how I hated it. And the next day, for absolutely no valid reason, a part of the road got damaged to the point where any car circulation was strictly forbidden. It has been for almost two weeks now. No one understands how, it’s as if there had been a small earthquake here, but it seems unreasonable. Nothing was felt, we’re not on a tectonic rift and the roads here are pretty sturdy. I don’t complain about it, but it did feel too much like a coincidence. I thought maybe it was like karmic retribution, I talked shit and now I got to feel guilty that I made so many peoples life worse and more difficult. I’m not religious, so I didn’t dwell on it too much.
But yesterday something else happened. I’ve been seeing a girl here. We’re not serious, but I guess there has been some form of emotional connection attaching us to each other. A mix of genuinely enjoying each others presence, and the fact that we’re both lonely and far from home. But we had a fight yesterday. It was something dumb, I jokingly mocked one of her favourite Disney characters, and didn’t realise how much it meant to her. In hindsight, I remember reading about how the brain has a hard time separating fiction from reality when it comes to emotions. Maybe to her, this character had a real emotional significance. I don’t know, I was too defensive of myself and didn’t think of it. I went back home, and kept thinking about how much the entire situation was dumb. By the time I was home, I had felt a bit more relaxed from the ride, and was seeing how this may have come through. I sent her a message apologising, saying I didn’t understand her point, but wanted to. And she didn’t see it. I thought maybe she archived my chat, needed some time to also think. And I was okay with that. Mostly. I couldn’t help but remember the road. I kept asking myself if I muttered something under my breath as I rode back. I hoped not.
Next day I go to her place. And my heart sinks when I see the police cars. I go there, ask what happens. They ask me the same, they had seen her texts. Her phone was there. Her wallet too. They saw our texts, and concluded her disappearance had nothing to do with me, but they’d keep me inform if anything came up.
I was a mess. You never expect this to happen to the people you know and get along with. And even if I tried rationalising it, I felt like it was all on me. I did this. I muttered. I had to go on a walk. I was on autopilot mode at this point, and couldn’t even think of my surroundings. I only realised where I was when I got to the road. My instincts told me to wait till a car had passed. But there were no cars. The road was broken. I had walked all the way here on my own. And I looked to the sky, the sky that probably should already be dark, but instead was only now setting. And I saw it. Remember the story I told you about? The one I wrote? In it I had a giant creature, Cthulhu like. I saw it. It was faded, as if made of clouds. But it was there. I could feel its eye on me, I could feel it reaching out, just like I wrote about it. As if a cold hand was trying to squeeze my brain for the knowledge it wanted to give. I could see its chest move, as if breathing. And then I saw the ground beneath me do the same. So slow. So imperceptible. And then the trees did too. The rocks. The houses. The canals. Everything.
It looked at me, and I looked back. I couldn’t ignore it, I was like a deer in front of headlights. And then it talked. Just like I wrote, it talked in a language I never heard, and yet I know it deep within me. The language of stardust and void. The language with which the Universe had been made. And with each word I could understand, with each thought dedicated to it, I could feel my body relax. My mind being split in two, one part being me, another being whatever it was trying to make out of me. This other part smiled and started walking to a bus station. It rode the bus home, it was relaxed, it wasn’t me, and yet it very much was. It answered to my mothers text, it talked to my classmates, it messaged my best friend, the one who I had shown my other story for opinion, and none of them knew it wasn’t me. He talked like me, joked like me, complained like me. But I could feel its thoughts, and it has none. All it wants is to spread awareness. To let others know that it’s there. That this monster, this entity, is around. Because once you see it, it can take you. It’s using the little of me that is left to write this. It can control how I’m writing this text, how I’m leaving the explanation to the end. Because now you know it could be there. And you’ll notice it. We all do sooner or later.
Run. Don’t fight it. Don’t believe in it. Don’t even assume I’m lying or that it is dead the moment it took me. That which is dead can never truly die. And if you see Ana, tell her I’m sorry. I would have loved to have fallen in love with her.