I am a single father of a beautiful 5 year old girl and an owner of a loyal and protective bernardine dog named Louie. My life was always full of beauty and joy but one night an unexplainable event in my life happened when Rachel, my wife of 13 years, vanished overnight.
Last time I remember seeing her was next to me in our bed smiling tenderly and beautifly as we both fell asleep, and the next day she was gone. I thought that this was a regular thing cause Rachel would ussualy wake up before me but when I explored the house, she was nowhere to be found. I called her multiple times praying she was safe but she wasn’t awnsering me. I dialed 911 and reported my wife was missing and told the police every detail I knew about her. Her long wavy dark brown hair, her hazel colored eyes, her big red lips, what she was wearing last time I saw her, a scar on her left shoulder and her golden watch I bought her when we met for the first time that she wore everyday.
I kept it a secret from my daughter as I didn’t want to give her so much stress at such a young age and just told her mummy went on a vacation. A search party of 250 police officers, 70 search dogs and 50 volunteers went on searching for her through the local park and all of the houses in our small town consisting of rougly 750 people. Nearly everyone was interviewed but they couldn’t make up any real evidence. 3 weeks later they declared Rachel dead and my heart sunk down. All the beauty of my life vanished and was replaced with an infity amount of emotional torture.
I couldn’t keep lying to my daughter so I told her mom died and when I saw her beautiful little face crumble up with pure dejection and misery made me feel like my heart bursted out of my chest and was being eaten away by a million toothed flesh eating creature. My life was not the same after that. My and my daughter’s feelings of emptiness and sorrow we’re occasionally interrupted by a disturbing sense of dread. Everyday at exactly 4:23 in the moring and afternoon, I would feel some ghostly cold and invisible hand touch my left shoulder and an ominous voice, similar to that of Rachel quietly but noticingly saying my name, ‘‘John’’ or sometimes an object being very violently thrown away.
I thought it was only me who felt these weird things happening, but at the dead of night I heard my daughters screams in her room and Louie barking like crazy. I rushed at the speed of light and there was my daughter shaking and squeezing her plush penguin near her face, telling me her nightlight was flickering slowly, but then it flickered faster and faster until it completely went off. I was thinking that it could probably be an electrical outlet being glitchy as this wasn’t the first time something like this happened in our home.
But then I witnessed the time on the clock. It was 4:23 AM. I felt a shiver run down my already weak spine, I couldn’t risk leaving my daughter alone, I took her and Louie to my bedroom and we slept there. When I woke up it was saturday, so I decided to turn on the TV and there was my daughter’s and mine favourite movie, ‘‘The Wizard of Oz’’. We took a nice comfortable seat and I felt genuine joy for the first time in weeks. Then my daughter kinda teared up and told me how she remembers how mom would dress her up as Dorothy and how her mom would dress up as the witch of the north and watch he movie together which managed to bring back that sad feeling but I went with it.
When the movie ended our neighbour invited us to go to her place so my daughter could play with her son. When we came up to her place my daughter met up with Noah (neighbour’s son) and them and Louie played with a big bouncy red ball. Me and Helen (neighbour) sat down to chat with a sip of some coffee. Helen quited out her tone for a bit and she told me how she supects it was a murderer who escaped prison 2 weeks before Rachel’s disappearance was the one who killed her.
She told me he was only around 23 and had very curly brown hair and that when he would succesfully kidnap someone, he would write out a message saying “I have him/her” and told me to be careful.
I couldn’t wrap my head how the police didn’t suspect that my wife could have been murdered by that man and it was also weird cause there was no note to be found. She sketched out a picture of him and told me if I see someone who looks like this near me to call the police.
I decided to take more secure measures. For the beggining, I took out all of the items in our house that could be used to kill or injure and hid them somewhere where only I could find them, then I updated my locks and keys for all the doors and windows. Lastly, I took out my daughter out of her room and told her she needs to sleep in my room with me and Louie. She gladly accepted.
I never slept, I was way too scared to fall asleep. However, one night, at exactly 4:30 AM, I saw him. I noticed an eye of pure evil creeping through the closet staring down at something, similarly to a scene from ‘‘Black Christmas’’. I prayed to God, that he didn’t notice that I saw him. I went out the room, took my daughter and Louie and quietly locked the door. I was not taking any risks. My daughter was asleep in my arms and Louie was quiet in his kennel. I took gasoline and poured it everywhere at the house, and spilled through the door crack some gas into the room where I thought I was safe in. I exited the house, lighted a match and threw it into the gasoline line.
The house started burning down as I heard unhuman screams coming from it. I went into the car and drove away as fast as I could. A couple hours later, I drove back to the house and parked the car a little further from the burned down building. There, I saw something that would terrify me for the rest of my remaining days.
There was a curled up thing similar to the fetus position laying down, burned to the crisp. I thought that it was the killer as Helen told me about, but it wasn’t. It barely resembled a human, it had sharp ears and was only 4 feet tall. It had really sharp yellow teeth and red eyes, it reminded me of the monsters from ‘‘The Descent’’. But what was next to the creature was even more horrifying, an also burnt, boney hand was next to the creature, and it carried a watch. A golden watch that my wife wore everyday ever since we met for the first time, and the time terrified me even more. The clock was badly burnt and was really hard to identify what time it was showing, but by the looks the clock was saying ‘‘4:23’’. I gasped and nearly fainted and ran down to my car, I opened the door and I saw something even worse.
Louie was missing and on the seat where my daughter was sitting was a bloody rusty ice pick jabbed through the seat and blood stains on it. There was a note on the icepick that was written a message with a sharpy marker saying:
-I have her.