Hey. It's Deb. Gittes is passed out right now, and he left his computer unlocked.
I know he's going to be pissed that I looked, but can you really blame me? When a mysterious man in a trenchcoat, with a beard like a homeless guy, enlists you to help him expose whatever is going on here, you'd want some answers too.
I suppose you probably want just as many answers too, and I can tell you now that I don't have many. I'll tell you what I know. I know this all seems a bit weird, but I just really need to get this stuff off my chest, and Gittes isn't exactly the most talkative guy.
Hold on.
Sorry. Somebody passed by the window just now. I think it was just the manager of the hotel. Er, I hope it was.
I'd give you my full name, but I know that there's probably other people reading this that would go after my family if I did, so we'll stick with Deborah for now. I used to live in Indiana before this, in Gary. It's a total shithole, but it's home. My boyfriend was named Ted. He was cool. Really into movies, filmmaking, that kind of thing. We started dating when we were in high-school, and we would still be dating if he hadn't just disappeared.
Something started following us about a year ago. Some creature. It was tall, maybe seven feet or so. Big, bulky, with what looked like a deer skull for a head. Bright, white eyes, like flashlights. Huge antlers. I started seeing it after we moved in together.
I think it marks people. Nobody else I knew had seen it. Just Ted and me. I think he might have been marked before I was, and maybe it spread to me. I'm not sure. All I know is that it started watching us from the woods outside our apartment complex. It was just little things that happened at first. We'd both get headaches around the same time, we'd both start smelling nutmeg in weird places, we both started finding wet footprints outside our door. That really spooked Ted. He started going off about how it had "left him alone for so long". I never got him to explain what he meant.
Things just went downhill from there. We started fighting more. Ted dropped out of his classes, I started flunking out of mine. That thing started getting more brazen. It would show up outside our bedroom window and just watch us for hours. I didn't say anything, it didn't do anything. It just watched us. For a while, at least.
Then we started seeing it inside the apartment, and that was when Ted just disappeared. He left in the middle of the night, after he got up to check out some noise outside. We figured it was the thing. He was gone for a long time. Almost thirty minutes or so. Then, he just walked back in, really calm-like, packed some things and just walked right out the door. Not a word out of him the whole time.
It took me a long time to start looking. He left a voicemail the very next day, saying he was ok and that he was going to Redwood Falls. I had never heard of the place, and it took me almost three days of searching the internet to find anything remotely useful about the town. This blog. Gitte's blog.
You can call it stalking, but I followed the blog and managed to track him down. I thought that maybe, just maybe, this weird asshole might have answers. I don't think I'm wrong, but I don't think he was the answers I need. This town does, though. I've seen that thing in the woods when I look outside, but not as much here. This place has a strange aura to it. A weird feeling that something's just not quite right. It's hard to describe.
I don't know.
Sometimes, I think I really don't want to know. Maybe there are things that I'm better off not knowing. It's the lack of closure about this that keeps me going. I just need to understand why. Why would something do this to people? What's the endgame? Is Ted gone?
I just don't know anymore.
Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.
I'm going to go ahead and post it. Gittes will be pissed, but I need to get this out there. I need to get this off my mind to someone. I just want someone out there to know what's really going on.
