That, and because of what I saw after, later in life, I realized what was really happening with those like Nolan or the girl that wasn’t ever found. They weren’t murdered or let go or anything. They were initiated into whatever occult practice they were following. It made me wonder though, why Nolan. I was their target, but he was the one they took by force like that. I guess what I’m asking is what made me so special?
Not only that, but why was I the only one hearing the voices like I was and why did I feel so… so… I don’t know, so hollow without them?
I was carried from the car where I was following the discovery and put in the back of the officer’s cruiser. Backup arrived about a minute after, where a few others tried, and failed, to question me, about either my state of being or about the events themselves. I was essentially a doll to them, completely empty on the inside. No mental capacity whatsoever.
Time passed, though I had no perception of it whatsoever, and I was taken to the hospital to be checked for any sort of head trauma. Somewhere along the way, I picked up that they were called to the scene from a random passerby, someone I somehow, though not entirely surprisingly, given the circumstances during and afterward, that I hadn’t picked up on before. At the hospital, they tried again to question me about what happened and/or if I had any family members that could look after me. Again, I just sat and stared blankly at them.
I don’t know how long it was; days, weeks, hell maybe even a full month (sure as hell felt like it anyway), before I started coming back to a semblance of my normal mind. Obviously, I never fully recovered, but I could at least perceive the world around me, and I’d respond occasionally when one of the nurses spoke to me. For the most part, though, I was isolated after that, not speaking or doing much of anything that didn’t feel necessary to me. The police came one or two more times, but both times got them more or less the same result as before. I was lucid now, sure, but that didn’t mean I had any better grasp on what was going on in the street that day.
So the days, weeks, months, whatever, passed and I was eventually discharged from the hospital. ANd before you ask, yes, I did undergo extensive brain scans and MRIs to see whether or not I had any sort of abnormalities, and no, outside of the usual factors of an autistic brain, I was perfectly fine. I was sent from there to a boy’s home just along the edge of town, having no other surviving family to take me in. My time there was weird more than anything else.
I won’t say bad, I was okay enough and the others were nice enough to me, but ever since the day in the street, I couldn’t ever shake the feeling of isolation from the other kids. From other people, in fact. I never understood it, but for some reason, I just felt like there was something about me that just didn’t belong here anymore. Like there was something about me that was just wrong. I couldn’t be happy at things other people were, I couldn’t get emotional at the same things they did. Nothing had any meaning to me, I guess I’m trying to say here.
Thing is, I knew this wasn’t depression, either, least not in the way I’ve always understood it. It’s not that I didn’t want to be happy, but always felt sad. No, I couldn’t feel happy or sad.
In any case, I was turning 17 when I did it. When I made the single most regrettable decision of my life. When I decided to go back to Hallowed Stone. By that time, it’d gotten into my head that, without the voices, the screams, I was set to be this way, empty, forever. I guess you could call it my mind’s last hope at trying to properly regain my stability in trying to reintroduce the voices that’d seemed to be a sustenance for it. The thought of it scared me, admittedly, but I wasn’t going to live an empty husk the rest of my life, either. It was nighttime and I was the only one still awake in the home. I shared a room with a bunk mate by the name of Frank. “Froggy” we called him, due to his eyes both being the size of satellite dishes.
I didn’t realize just how light a sleeper “Froggy” was until I had just made it down the ladder of our bunk and saw him stir and sit up. “Wha-What’re you doing man?” he asked, groggy. I stared at him, startled and unsure of how the hell to even try explaining to him that I was sneaking out to go trespass in the cemetery. Despite the fact that “Froggy”, from as much as I’d come to know him by then, wasn’t a snitch, I still didn’t feel comfortable with him knowing. He wouldn’t understand, plus, though not a snitch, he was a bit of an adventurer. He’d want in, and I wasn’t trying to be responsible for someone else.
“I-I’m, uh… Going out.” He went upright in the bed.
“Out? Where? Dude, do you know what frickin’ time it is?” I sighed and made for the door. “Hold up, man.”
I should’ve kept going. Should’ve ignored him and gone right out that door, but no. I stayed and turned to face him. He was jumping from his bunk to run over to me. “Hold up, man, I’m comin’ with.”
“Dude, no, I–” I was cut off when I saw him cup his hands to his mouth like he was about to shout. I grabbed his wrists and glared into his eyes. He just stared back, knowing he had the upper hand here. “Fine.” I growled, sighing, “But you better stick by me at all times and so help me GOD, if a word of this goes to ANYONE–”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Now, where’re we going?”
I clenched my jaw. “I’ll tell you in a minute, let’s get out of here first.” We quietly slipped out of our room and ducked down. The hallway was quiet, dark. Fortunately, our particular room was one of the ones just a few feet or so away from the main lobby. The two of us were able to easily enough sneak by without making much of a sound.
Once we made it to the lobby, we were out the front door and scurrying like a couple of ninjas into the night. After clearing the premises of the boy’s home, Froggy stopped me. “Okay, we’re out now, so what’s next?” I looked at him, inhaling sharply.
“Hallowed Stone.” His eyebrows cocked at me. “You know, the cemetery where–”
“Yeah, yeah, I know the place, but why there?” I sighed again. I was afraid he’d ask this question. I truthfully am having a hard time even now trying to explain my reasoning for this, so you can imagine it being damn near impossible for me back then.
“I… I got a… a…”
“What? A dealer? You trying to get a little bit of green?” He had that wry, wild smile on his face. I would’ve corrected him, if it weren’t for the fact that at least that sounded plausible. Weird how the truth works sometimes, isn’t it?
“Y-Yeah… Yeah, I’m gonna get a couple dimebags.”
“Bro, and you weren’t gonna cut me in?” He punched me on the shoulder and exclaimed, “The fuck!”
“Shh, dude. You trying to wake the fuckin’ world up and let them know we snuck out?” He plastered an “Oopsie-daisy” smile and shrugged. I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Look, let’s just go. I’ll uh…” I paused for a moment, feeling both foolish and anxious about what I was going to say next, “I’ll let you have some, okay?” He winked and clicked his tongue at me and we headed off for the cemetery. It was about another half hour before we came upon it again. Half an hour through a cold, windy, yet eerily quiet night.
We stood at the gate of Hallowed Stone for about a good ten or so minutes with me just blankly staring off into the distance inside. Somehow, I saw the grounds, the swaying grass, the worn, weathered headstones, and the cluster of trees along the other edge of the outer fence, and I imagined that I was looking into a black sort of abyss. A sort of Hell where eternal fire itself was snuffed out, suffocated, by darkness, pure and unfiltered, like the inside of a black hole.
I stared into Hallowed Stone, and I was staring into oblivion itself. Into nonexistence itself. Immediately, I was hollow again. I could see Froggy shaking my right shoulder, but I couldn’t feel it.
“You’re here… You’ve come… Come closer, Hank…” Before I knew it, my foot was crossing the threshold, entering Hallowed Stone.
“Dude, what the hell are you doing?” Froggy’s voice pitifully cried out, almost immediately being drowned out by the sea of ghoulish wails. I continued forward, staring straight ahead of me.
“Closer, Hank. Come. Come.”
I was approaching the stretch of trees. The darkness ahead swallowed what little bit of color there was the closer I came to them. This time, it wasn’t just my senses that dissolved away at the return of the voices. No, this time, it felt like with each step I took, big or small, I somehow lost more and more parts of myself. Like each step was somehow slowly ejecting my spirit from my body.
“It’s time, Hank. He’s waiting. We’re all waiting…”
The abyss was all around me now. In next to no time at all, I was in the center of the cemetery, surrounded by the dense trees. Through it all, I could see three hooded figures standing in front of me, about three or four feet away, with their arms outstretched to me, beckoning to me.
“Come into the End. Come… and be complete.”
My mind was completely gone now. Gone entirely from my body. I was watching my body move forward from outside of it. Their voices were deafening now.
“He waits to be completed!”
“Hank!” Cried Froggy again, being once again drowned out. “Hank, wait up, what’re you doing?” I keep walking, paying neither him nor anything any attention. Suddenly, I heard him cry out, “Hey, wait, what the?” I stopped then. I wanted to turn to see what was going on with Froggy, of course, but I was a statue. It was like I’d had just enough self control left in me to be able to make myself stop in acknowledgement of my friend’s distress, but not enough to actually respond to it.
I heard Aunt Rosa’s voice blast in my ear, “Come, Hank. There’s nothing for you here, in this world. This is our fate, the fate of all things that be. To become one, in the End.”
My legs were shaking, stuck between wanting to move forward at the voices’ commands, move backward to see what was going on with Froggy, and just wanting to stand perfectly still. “Deadlocked” I guess is the word for it. Nolan’s voice then came in my other ear.
“Don’t you want to be with us again?” His voice sounded small. Weak. Sad, even, like me not wanting to comply was hurting his feelings. The same went for Aunt Rosa and all the others that were swarming me in that moment for that matter. I heard Froggy let out more cries of panic from behind me. The trio in front of me started toward me, gliding, so it seemed, across the grass, defying gravity. My legs shook harder and harder until I finally managed somehow to break the entropy I was under and turned around.
Froggy was in the arms of two of the figures from behind me. I saw them wrestle him to the ground with ease just like they had with Nolan and my mother before. “Join us, Hank.” I heard, louder than ever, blasting into my ears. “He waits to be completed. Join us in taking him.”
Like that, I was under their influence again, out of my own mind and taking steps once again toward them. Though I’ve been saying a million times now that when I was like this, empty, I couldn’t feel things like when someone was touching me, I felt the hands of two of the three hooded figures I was approaching earlier touch my shoulder. To say “feel”, though, is admittedly the only way I really know how to describe it, despite it not being entirely accurate. It wasn’t so much a “feeling” as it was a sense. A sort of perception that wasn’t entirely tangible.
In layman’s terms, it’s the closest you’d ever get to knowing what it felt like to a ghost touching you. You “feel” something, but there’s nothing to actually feel. That’s what that was, and I turned to face them. They both stared back at me, using their free hands to remove their hoods to reveal their vulpine grins, with their coal black eyes, piranha teeth, and ghoulish skin to match. My eyes grew, seeing this.
They all had it, the features of the Black-Eyed man. Dots began connecting in my head with the man’s deep, bellowed words from the day Nolan was abducted, “We are, all of us, one in the end…”
The one at my left, a young man I didn’t know at all, lowered his jaws wide like he was about to swallow me whole and, in the familiar bellow, he said, “There’s nothing to fear, Child. The End comes to all. All things that began, were separated, but can be joined in the end.” He looked over again to the ones holding Froggy. “You hear them, don’t you, Hank? They cry for you. They need you… WE need you…”
I follow his gaze to see them positioning Froggy in the same star-shaped position they had with Momma that day. I could hear Froggy yelling at them, “Get the fuck off me! Hank, help! Get these psycho-fucks off me!” I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. Not only that, though, but part of me didn’t… Didn’t want to move.
“Take him, Child.” Commanded the voice of the man beside me. “Deliver him into the End. Become one with us all, Hank.”
I started toward them. Froggy had his neck arched up to me, staring straight into my eyes with an expression of utter terror chiseled on his face. “Hank, what the hell?” he cried. “What the fuck is going on, what are you doing?”
I said nothing. With each step I took, he began writhing violently in his captor’s arms. I kept eye contact the entire time I was approaching. Every shade of fear, every shade of anguish and sorrow, and every shade of dread had washed over his face at least twice by the time I reached them. I stood over him for a moment, beholding the sight of him at my mercy. It felt like nothing to me. There was no thrill, no adrenaline, nothing. I saw this sight the way I saw wet paint on a wall beginning to set. It meant nothing to me.
There was no reason in my head. No feeling throughout my body. No soul inside me. I was nothing. All that was left that indicated to me that I was even alive at all were the thousands of millions of wailing voices that had, by that point, formed themselves into a sort of droning ambiance in my mind. That was all I was, an empty vessel for a screaming legion, a conduit, just like I realized the rest of these hooded people were.
Tears ran in bullets down Froggy’s cheeks. “Dude, please!” he squealed. His attempts at freedom had become feeble by now. The figure at my left took his hand from my shoulder and pulled out a blade before kneeling down to him. Facing me, raising his arms into the air, I heard him recite, “We take thy body, that is thy vessel.” Froggy screamed as the blade came down, plunging right above his navel and dragging it upward. His cries were quickly changed into desperate gasps for breath. Just like with my mother, I could do nothing but stand there and watch, hypnotized.
He withdrew the blade and raised it into the air again before plunging it into his left shoulder, reciting, “We take thy spirit, that is thy mortality.” Froggy’s body writhed wildly. The figure dragged the blade across his chest before then withdrawing and repeating the process on the other side, reciting, “We take thy blood, that is thy life.” Froggy’s body relaxed and his eyes started to glaze. The blade was raised into the air again and the figure said, “And we deliver it unto the End, that we may be complete.”
What came next disgusts me. It’s given me countless nightmares, even beyond what I’d experienced the year before after losing both Nolan and Momma, though not just because of the sheer trauma I witnessed, but because of the part I played in it. Noah, If this is you reading this, if you think me any lesser as a man, a husband, or as your father, I understand. I want you to know that I love you, and that I always tried, just for you.
After making this declaration, Froggy’s skin was peeled away like a candy wrapper to expose his innards underneath. Froggy was still alive, too, just barely audibly gasping for breath. I want to throw up, thinking about it now, all the open guts on display like that, but back then, in that moment, I had no reaction at all to this. The figure then reached down into the center of his chest area and tightly grabbed his heart, forcefully ripping it away while the other three or four then began picking at everything left of him like they were vultures. He held the still – though only barely – beating heart out to me, offering it to me.
“Take it and join us in The End, Hank.” I stared at him, at the heart, at the figures ravenously devouring my friend, and then back at him. I could hear Froggy’s screams the same as I could hear Momma’s before, slowly spiraling into my head to mix with the legion of other voices screaming at me. My hand unconsciously began to raise up as if to take the heart from him. As it did so, the louder and louder, the closer and closer, I heard Froggy’s screams invade my mind.
“Take it, Hank. Consume the spirit and join us!” The tips of my fingers brushed against the fading organ when I heard something that had my mind divided in half. It was Momma’s voice. It wasn’t like the others, though. It wasn’t goading me like they were, but instead it was just her screaming.
This, I believe, is what broke me. She wasn’t just crying out, she was begging. I couldn’t hear any speech from it, but I could hear it in her voice. My arm stopped, beginning to shake. My mind was returning, I could feel it. The voices shrieked louder at me, pushing me to take the heart, but Momma’s cries drowned them out. The voices started fading again into the back of my head.
My senses were returning to me. I could feel the icy night wind pricking across my bare flesh. I could feel the grass under my bare feet. I could feel the soft tissue of the now dead heart against my fingertips. I could actually bring my arm down. I began to backpedal away. My mind was clear again. I was myself again, my mind was my own.
The figure clutching the heart took a step toward me. I could see he sensed that something was up. He knew I wasn’t under his or who/whatever’s spell anymore. His grin lowered to form a menacing scowl. Without wasting another second, I turned and started booking for the exit of Hallowed Stone. From behind me, I could hear a deafening howl that sounded like a thousand wolves howling at the same time from inside a hurricane.
Out of reflex, I turned back to see them all gliding toward me, flying across the grass and past the headstones. This shot bolts of adrenaline through me like it was electricity flowing through a circuit board and I was zipping through the cemetery yard myself, my focus dead set on the front gates. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them, all right in my tail. I didn’t stop.
Another howl blasted from behind me, sounding like the mix of a hyena’s shriek and the bellow of a lion. I didn’t stop, though, until something caught my ankle and I was jerked to the ground. When I looked behind me this time, I couldn’t help but scream. The figures, all of them, all with their black eyes, jagged teeth, and albino skin, were now conjoined into one giant, writhing, disgusting abomination that had the primary head of the one that was offering me the heart earlier, and with the rest of them having their heads and torsos acting as its many limbs.
The primary head opened its mouth and with a thunderous, inhuman voice, I heard it shout, “This is truth, Hank! This is humanity’s true form, from the beginning of time, and so to until its end. We are what you all become, in the end.”
I frantically started trying to jerk my ankle free. It had the grip of a bear trap around me, with its nails even managing to dig deeper and deeper with each jerk, tearing more and more through it with each try. It stung like hell, feeling like hot pokers and shards of broken glass were being forcefully jammed into my ankle, but I was able to wrench my foot free from its grasp. I sprang up as quickly as I could and started again making for the gates. I was limping, each rime weight was put on my foot, excruciating pain erupted from my ankle. I ignored it as much as possible though and kept running.
I heard the thing behind me gaining on me. Only for a second did it cross my mind that, even if I made it to and out of the gates, what was stopping it from leaving and following me. This would ultimately be something that would come back to haunt me now, almost ten years later. I kept running, through the gate and out into the street. I’d made it about halfway down the street away from Hallowed Stone before the adrenaline wore off enough for me to turn around and see if they were still after me.
There was nothing. The street was empty, quiet. I was alone. I was hurt.
I was lost.
Panic started buzzing around in my head. What was I gonna do? What could I do? Where was I supposed to go? Back to the Boy’s home? And what was I supposed to say?
“Me and Froggy snuck out to fuck around in Hallowed Stone and we were jumped by these hooded psychos that murdered him.”
It was the truth, but how was I going to be able to explain that to them? I’m having a hell of a time now just trying to explain it in writing, never even mind trying to explain it as a 17 year old kid that could just barely handle himself. Contradictory to all of this, though, to answer your question, yes, that’s exactly what I did.
It took me almost an hour, and every second of it was spent in agony with sharp pains running through my foot. Regardless, I managed to make it there, where I then proceeded to limp my way in and down the halls, calling out for someone to help me. After about a minute or so, I heard the footsteps of the administrative staff come stomping down the hallway for me. I gotta say, it’s almost funny, normally hearing those footsteps would’ve sent me into a panic, knowing that there was gonna be trouble. This time, though, despite the hysterical state of mind I was still in, as well as the fact that I still wasn’t sure how I was going to explain what happened, I almost couldn’t have been more relieved when I saw them come for me.
What happens after this is mostly history. The major events that happened soon after were that the police were called, and I gave the best statement I could to them both. I stuck to the truth, too, unbelievable as it may have been, and to their credit, they at least seemed to take me seriously – probably due in part to the fact that they had already seen bits of it for themselves the year before. After that, I was taken to the hospital again to be treated for my foot. They were able to close the wounds and stitch it up, but the doctors told me I’d never be able to use it properly again, with the ligaments having all been severed.
I walked from then to the present with a cane and a limp. I can’t feel anything in that foot. At least, though, I could feel everything else. At least, I could for another ten years after.
I stayed with the Boy’s home for another year until I turned 18 and aged out. From there, they were able to help plug me into a small job as a cashier at a grocery store, a job where I was allowed certain accommodations because of my condition. Over the next year and a half, I was able to save up enough money to buy a house just a little ways away from the old neighborhood, far from Hallowed Stone, and soon after that, Noah, was when I met your mother. And after that, well… we had you, the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
I just wished it all would’ve ended there. It should’ve. But last week, it all started happening again. Te episodes started again. The voices, I could hear them crying out to me again. Aunt Rosa, Nolan, all of them, all calling for me to return to the cemetery to finish what they’d started. At first, I tried counteracting them with the memory of Momma’s screams, the same way I did that night in the cemetery, but this quickly lost its effect, leaving me with no other defense.
I’ve been seeing them, too, stalking me and my family from dark corners of the alleys and off in the distances. They stand there, holding their hands out to me, goading me just like they did years ago. I thought I’d escaped them when, in reality, I’d only led them around, now bringing more innocent people, including my own wife and son, into their cross hairs.
All because I just had to go back to Hallowed Stone…
So to whoever’s reading this, this’s what I want you to know; that I am truly sorry. By the time you read this, I’ll have been long gone, either meeting my fate in whatever gruesome fashion these ghouls concoct, or by being presumably inducted into their fold. Yes, this is it. You will never see me again, or at least, not as the man I was. I hope you won’t see me again at all. In any case, I am returning one last time to Hallowed Stone, and so this is goodbye.
To Diana and Noah, I love you both and I hope that somewhere, somehow, we can all be together again…
***
I found this yesterday, after passing the third day unsuccessfully searching for my father. It was Wednesday, after I’d come home from the bus stop, that I found that he had disappeared. He’d been gone since Tuesday afternoon. Me and Mom called the police and a missing persons report was issued.
I don’t know exactly when this was written, but if I had to guess, it would’ve been that Tuesday. He had been acting strange, skittish, like he constantly thought he was being followed. Neither me nor Mom could understand why, and he was more distant from us, closed off with us, than usual. Dad had always been a bit unspoken and reserved, sure (and now I may understand a bit better as to why), but he was all but shutting us out for most of the week leading up to his disappearance.
I understand if anything you’ve just read seems unbelievable. Trust me, I thought the same thing at first. I honestly thought my father was suffering from some sort of psychosis, until I went searching through he and Mom’s room, hoping to find some sort of clues, and found the old newspapers dating back to the early nineties regarding the old neighborhood and the cemetery. This letter was found taped over one of the first reports of the murders Dad mentioned, titled “The Damnation of Hallowed Stone”.
Wherever he is now, I hope he’s okay. I’m still not sure of some of the more speculative parts of his letter, but if half of what he wrote of was true, I hope he’s able to make it out okay and come home again. I miss him and I’m scared. I’m scared even more so now for Mom.
See, another reason I’m typing this out for you all is because, to attest more to Dad’s elegy, I, too saw a hooded figure, watching me. I can’t be sure, but I think I could even hear it say something like “Come join us…”