Hi. So, this is awkward. I’m not Fiona Novak. I’ve never really done anything like this before. Of course I know Reddit, I mean, obviously, but writing like this isn’t my kinda thing. I’m still gonna try. No worries, Forest Bride is gonna be back soon, but for now you’re stuck with me.
Just to introduce myself, my name is Jacek Hettmann. I used to live in the old black mill in the Novaks’ woods. Then my Dad died; I met and fell helplessly in love with the young daughter of his former childhood friend and… yeah. You know what happened. I’ve seen the other posts. I had some time to read through all of them earlier, and damn, has it messed me up. There was a lot of stuff in there that I just really hadn’t known before?? I coulda lived in peace not knowing about the sauna orgy, but fuck, that’s on me. I should’ve just stayed that day. But you know how it is when you’re in denial. Rejecting her was a defense mechanism. But I regretted it even then. I’m glad she knows how I feel. We haven’t talked about it yet, but… whatever. I’m all tingly. And I’m glad to be back, even though things were looking pretty bleak there for a while.
Nick has given me permission to return. I know he wants me to talk Fiona into spilling the tea and giving him permission to start his little excavation soon. I intend to do no such thing, nor will I share the information I now have with him. I don’t rightly know how I feel about being handed around like bribery. Guess that’s just what I signed on for, though. She’s asleep right now, as is Casimir. And their father, too, only difference being he’s tied up on the floor.
I stopped it with the fire once I got him to surrender, then I went over to him and knocked him out. Getting him and Fiona back to the house wasn’t exactly easy, but Licorice was a big help. I basically loaded Fiona onto his back and had him carry her. Yeah, I’ve got the dog with me. It’s not his fault for doing what an animal like him does, and I guess now we’re even for me leaving him hanging all those years. I went about dragging Daddy Dearest back myself, and damn, was that a chore. Nothing I couldn’t handle, though—not to brag, but I’m a pretty strong guy. Although my smoking has done a number on my lungs. I sorta felt that by the time I’d reached the house. Might have to dial down on the cigarettes a bit. I’m just glad Fiona wasn’t awake to hear me wheezing my heart out.
Okay, that came out wrong. But you know what I mean.
Once we were there, I carried both of them inside. The door was still open. I wasn’t surprised to find Casimir passed out in the living room. What a shitshow. I don’t really know how to deal with injured people, so I just laid both the siblings down on the sofa and went about tying up the Dad. That I’m good at.
Cas was the first to wake up. Boy, was he glad to see me. He checked Fiona for wounds, and said that she seemed to be overall okay. She joined us in the land of the living not long after, and it was obvious she was in a fuckton of pain (kinda broke my heart there a little bit). She insisted she’d be fine and that all she needed was rest. I wanted to get both of them to see a doctor as soon as possible, but those two are stubborn as shit. Casimir literally agrees with everything his big sister tells him, and the woman herself… well. I can’t really fault her for being hard-headed and wanting to pull through. Not when that’s literally one of the most attractive things about her.
I’m worried, though. About Cas in particular. On my last visit here, just before I was about to leave, he’d pulled me to the side to talk in private. He’d been hoping to convince me to stay, and he’d shared something pretty troubling about his health. I won’t say what here because it’s really not my place, but you catch my drift.
Either way, both of them appear to be doing fine, given the circumstances. Cas has been researching a bunch of things, and Fiona’s taken the time to write out the previous post and is now sleeping. They’ve promised they’ll seek medical treatment as soon as this whole thing is over, which, we’re all guessing, is gonna be any day now. It really feels like everything’s coming to a head.
I’ve got a rough couple days behind me myself, but I’ll save that story for another time. This is actually about something else. Fiona has asked me to write out what happened with her younger brother Jeremy. She says she’s not ready to hear it yet, but that she would like to have the choice to do so later. She also figured this would be interesting to the lot of you who’ve been reading her updates. So here I am.
The whole ordeal took place around three years ago. I had long since settled into my new, more modern life. I have a place on the surface, but mainly, I hang around at my other apartment in the Pride hellsphere. Nick likes to always have me nearby in case anything comes up he might need me for. Hell is a nice enough place when you’re not there to be punished. Besides, I’ve made a couple friends down there, and while those admittedly aren’t the most stable or intimate connections, I’m always in good company if I wanna party. My exact job is a little harder to describe. I’m basically the on-call guy doing whatever Nick needs me for at all times. That obviously means I’ve seen some shit, but Jeremy Novak… that guy actually gave me nightmares. Me. Nightmares. Yeah.
So Nick called me into his office that day and had me sit down with him, which I’ve come to learn means that whatever he’s about to tell me is going to be wild. He further confirmed this suspicion by literally telling me to “buckle up” as he lit himself a cigar and handed me a beer.
“You surely remember Fiona Novak?” he began, eyeing me attentively.
“Vividly,” I replied. I hadn’t heard that name in a while. I didn’t like the tightness in my chest it caused. I had been trying to forget it for a very long time, to no avail, which just made me feel really pathetic. It had become sort of a she-who-must-not-be-named sort of thing. Remembering Fiona meant mostly regrets, and every time I’d allowed myself to think of her, I’d end up locking myself into my bedroom and eating Nutella out of the jar.
“So. You used to be around her a lot. Any chance you ever met her brother?”
“Which one?”
“The second-born. Jeremy.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Probably not.”
“Well then, you will. And rather soon, if I can help it.” My Master shot me a meaningful glance. “He’s gone and turned a bunch of parents into mourners.”
“He been killing people?” I asked, admittedly dumbfounded.
“M-hm. Girls. Many of them, forty-two to be exact. I’ve been waiting on the cops to get him for over a year now… The bastard’s kinda clever. Either that, or he’s been lucking out, ‘cause I sure as fuck ain’t helping him. You know how I can be. I do appreciate a bit of violence here and there, but when someone goes and offs more humans than I can count with my fingers, that’s just the kind of over-the-top impertinence I don’t approve of anymore. At first, I figured he’d be entertaining, but he’s gone too far. It’s time for him and I to meet, if you catch my drift.” Nick’s smile was wide and open, his tongue briefly slithering across his front teeth. He shot me a wink.
“Consider it done,” I replied casually.
“That easy? Even though you guys go back?”
“We don’t ‘go back’. I saw him once or twice maybe; years ago.” I shrugged. “‘S all in the past.”
“Good. Because you’re not going to like what you’ll see out there.” He handed me a slip of paper with two addresses on it. “It’s a waste disposal site. Unprotected, no surveillance. Get there, find the latest victim. He’s left her there somewhere. Then go to his place and collect him for me. I want his soul, his consciousness, his essence. You know what that means.”
“You want him to die in some particular way, or…?”
Nick smiled thinly. “Just take a look at the scene and follow whatever mood that puts you into, mkay?” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Just one thing, though. Jeremy Novak is going to spend the rest of his eternity in our prison. Make sure his first impression of us will be memorable.”
Just an hour or so later, I was standing in front of a gigantic, stinking heap of trash. It was late at night, no sounds except some bird cawing way off in the distance. Jem had come a far way from his new home to dump this corpse. Smart move. But for the girl, what a horrible fucking place to end up. I began picking my way through the waste, breathing through my mouth. This would have been the famous search for the needle in the haystack, except I’ve got honed instincts—you spend a considerable portion of your life around dead things, you kind of get a feel for them. I found her buried beneath piles of junk, wrapped up in plastic. I dragged her to the side where I knelt down and took out my pocket knife. Cutting her free took longer than expected. Novak had rolled her into, like, five or six layers, and he’d even stuffed papers and styrofoam in there to obscure the shape of the person underneath.
When I finally removed the last bit of crinkling tissue from the girl’s upper body and laid eyes on her face, my stomach dropped.
Matted dark hair spilled out from the plastic, pale skin baring itself to the night air, glazed gray eyes staring up into the starry sky.
No.
I fell back onto my hands, scrambling away from the corpse like a spider startled out of its web. The air around me suddenly seemed to think; I felt like I couldn’t get enough of it into my body to sustain me—I was hyperventilating. I couldn’t get a proper hold of any of the thoughts that were suddenly racing through my head. It was all a big, panicked frenzy, “Don’t be her; why her? Out of all forty-two, why does she have to be the one I had to find?”
Kinda selfish, that last one, I know. But I was out of it. My mind was screaming, and a cold phantom pain stung the frayed edges of the hole in my chest like the heart that wasn’t there was about to break all over again. I willed my tear-blurred eyes to focus on her face again, I willed myself to look…
My shoulders sagged in relief. It wasn’t her.
It wasn’t her.
The hair was dark, yes, but not quite dark enough, the gray of the irises was a tad darker, and the features, though on first glance rather similar, in fact wholly different. On top of that, she looked to be in her early twenties, so younger than Fiona had to have been at the time. The superficial resemblance however remained striking. This could not have been a coincidence. This girl had died because of her looks. A grim picture started piecing itself together in the back of my mind. I stared at the body with knitted brows. How had he killed her? There were no obvious injuries drawing my attention. No stab wounds, no marks around the neck to indicate strangulation. I moved her head, then pulled on her arm a little. Rigor mortis had already lifted; the corpse had to be over a day old.
I was beginning to suspect something.
Now, here’s something I’ve been called a pussy for by a bunch of my colleagues: I still get severely grossed out by a lot of shit. Depending on who they’re from, I also hate seeing exposed guts and blood—not a problem when I’m the one to draw it, of course. Okay, so, I’m basically working on bringing about the fall of humanity and all holy creation, and I stand behind that concept, but innocent folks suffering too much still sort of gets me. I mean, some things just cross the line, you know?
I started to pull back the wrapping covering her lower body and the line got so fucking crossed.
There was a knife sticking out between her legs. It had been rammed into her several times, leaving her privates completely mutilated. I don’t care to describe it in any further detail.
I staggered back, turning around as if to spare the dead girl the offending sight as I proceeded to empty my stomach. The piercing stench helped as the display I had just witnessed managed to draw even the last scraps of undigested content from my body. When I was finally done puking, I had to sit down for a while. My face buried in my sweat-laced palms, I tried to collect my thoughts. There were only so many conclusions to be drawn from a killing like this. It had been a brutal, savage act of hatred. The fact that forty-one other women had suffered the same fate made the situation even more horrific.
I left the disposal site in flames, burnt it all to a crisp. With my schedule packed and Nick wanting results, I didn’t have the time nor energy to take the girl somewhere proper, but I couldn’t leave her lying there, either. She looked so lost in all that trash, so lonely and cold and exposed. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself to cremate her. Perhaps she’d had parents or a guy or something who’d have wanted to know what happened to her. Then again, her simply never being found was probably an easier-to-stomach story than the truth. Just a forever missing person.
I wondered where her essence had ended up. It’s easy, if you’ve got unfinished business, you get reborn; if you’re nice, you go to heaven and if you’re bad but not bad (or interesting) enough for Nick to waste space on you in hell, he eats your consciousness. Just swallows you whole and that’s it, you’ll be gone forever. Then of course there’s the lost souls who never even make it off the earth, but those are a whole other story.
Anyways, I made it to Jem’s place. It was this ground floor apartment, so I picked open one of the windows. I’m rather good at that kind of thing. My job has its perks. It’s like a blessing from the other side. Whatever crap I get up to usually works out fine for me, so long as it’s against some sort of law. Human or otherwise.
I got in quietly enough. Jeremy didn’t seem to be home. I kinda wished he had been; coulda just grabbed him and gotten it over with right then and there. This way, I’d need to kill some time, and I’m unfortunately a hopeless snoop. I knew I’d go through his junk, but I wish I hadn’t. I started with his nightstand. I find that a lot of people keep things that are really important to them nearby as they sleep, so I figured there’d have to be some interesting stuff in there. I was right. I dug up a brown envelope with a ton of polaroids inside. I had expected them to be of his victims, but the fact of the matter made me feel arguably more icky.
They were of Fiona. Not only of her, though—Ania, too. Just holding them felt weird. It was a mix of old family photos and pictures that must have been taken in secret. Ania sleeping in bed next to her husband, a much younger Fiona conked out on the couch… Some of them were stained. I dropped them and ran to wash my hands when I realized with what.
The sick fuck. I don’t need to spell all of this out, do I? I really don’t want to.
I waited around for a long-ass time. I grabbed some beer from Jem’s fridge, kicked back on the sofa in his living room and resigned to watching tv. After an hour or so, I heard the door being unlocked. I simply stayed seated, waiting for him to come in. He wasn’t too shocked to find a stranger in his apartment. Part of me wondered if he even had the emotional capacity to feel that kind of fright. He simply rounded the couch and then stood still, locking eyes with me from across the room. I’d seen him before when he was just a boy—I recognized him, albeit just barely. The Novaks do have some familial resemblance. I stoically took another sip of my (his) beer, then motioned at the armchair across from me.
“We need to talk, Jem. Have a seat.”
“I know you,” he said slowly, voice pensive and pale eyes fixated on me as he lowered himself down. “You used to fuck my older sister.”
“Got one up on you there, it seems,” I replied casually, emptying the can in one last swift gulp before tossing it at his face. He didn’t move to dodge it and it bounced off his forehead before landing on the floor with a satisfying clanging. I don’t know why I did that—I normally try to keep my cool at all times, but I simply had a sudden burst of aggression right then and there. Jeremy Novak looked utterly unfazed, though. “You been expecting me or something?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe on some level. I was expecting someone, at least, probably not you specifically.”
“You knew of Fiona and me.”
“Duh. We all kinda knew. Well, not the little ones, but us guys. Cas because she told him and me because I saw you a bunch of times.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “You know, just occasionally… I managed to get a glimpse in.”
A shudder ran through the entirety of my body. “So what exactly is it that you’re doing here? You tryna make up for something here? None of those girls ever hurt you.”
“I know. They’re not her… not my sister, not my mother. My mother’s dead anyways, so I missed my shot. And with Fiona… I tried, you know. One time, I was nearly there. Had the knife in hand, she was sleeping… couldn’t do it though. Regret it. Often.” He sighed. “Head was acting up.”
“So you decided to let it out on every other girl you could find?”
“Come on, don’t act like you don’t get it. You know what she’s like, you know what that woman does to people. And Mom was even worse. Sure, you didn’t get the feel on her like I did, but you gotta understand when it comes to Fiona, right?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Okay, fine. So what do you want, what are you here for?”
“I’m taking you with me.”
Jem rolled his lips together. “Shit. Well. There’s nothing I can do, really, is there?”
“You’re welcome to try. I appreciate a bit of spunk, gets me going.” I smiled.
“I’m serious. There’s no chance I could actually overpower you, is there?”
“I’m not about to flatter myself. You’re like a whole head taller than me.” I spread my arms invitingly. “Wanna see what you can do?”
Jeremy leaned back in his seat. “No, I don’t think I will.”
Not to make this anti-climactic or anything, but Fiona is gonna end up reading this and I’d rather not let her see this side of me. I’m only like that when it’s for work. Jeremy did not see the light of day again, and he suffered as miserable a death as I saw fit for a bastard like him. That irritating calm he had about him broke away within the first hour he spent with me. I’ve read that he’s seemingly not forgotten me, and I’m all the more glad for it. The job itself wasn’t exactly delightful, though. I took no joy in it. Rather did a number on me, to be honest.
When I got home that night, I bought three burgers and a bottle of vodka. I destroyed them all in one sitting and then passed out in my living room. My roommate woke me up, called me a whiny bitch and then we ended up nearly bashing each other’s heads in. Not my finest moment. I like to think my coping mechanisms have improved at least a little bit, but I’m not quite sure. Life’s really just been passing by me these last couple years. Being here, being back home… it’s really nice. Better than it has been in ages.
I know I’ve pledged allegiance to another party, but I’m not going to be complicit in the woods being destroyed. I can’t go on kidding myself. I’ve tried to hate this place for a long time, and I’ve tried to hate it’s warden, but as it is now, honestly? I’m just regretting I left.