LINKS TO PRIOR INSTALLMENTS
Episode 1: Walking Dead
Episode 2: Dem Bones
Episode 3: Too Close To Home
Episode 4: Encounter
*Warning: Photographs and information in this ongoing series might be upsetting to some readers. Discretion advised.*
This will be an ongoing series chronicling a couple years' worth of encounters with bizarre, horrific, and taunting interplay between one innocent citizen and a stalker that defies description (at least in our known world).
This was an exceptionally well-documented series of events that may at times be too graphic or horrifying for some readers, but it is our hope that by sharing this experience, someone out there might recognize a set of circumstances that are similar.
We have advice to be given to anyone encountering what I am at a lack of words to accurately describe, so henceforth refer to it as…the stalker between the worlds.
Roadside Horror!
The skull and mandible were finally gone, after over a year of remaining in the spot that marked the baby boars' slaughtered display and the beginning of all the insanity. The Walker straightened up and walked away from the spot with a sigh of relief.
He took his route on a dewy morning and kept his usual brisk pace. Step, breathe, step, exhale, step, breathe, step, exhale. This repetitious cadence created a therapeutic and soothing ritual.
With his mind left to no longer ponder the passing of the "items" on the roadway near the quarry drive, the Walker found himself daydreaming about the coming season and cooler dryer temperatures and feeling generally right with the world.
He hadn't gone more than a couple dozen steps when his brow furrowed as he caught something out of place near the bushes off the roadway. Part of him wanted to know what was there, and a very powerful part of him urged, keep going! But instinct had him turn his head and the Walker stopped so quickly, he nearly stumbled.
At first, he wasn't sure he was seeing this. The Walker's head jerked up and he looked around him for others. Of course, being a quiet country road, he was the only one around. When he looked again, he realized it wasn't just a dead dog, but a doberman. A couple of dobermans had been running loose along the roadways for some time now, acting kind of twitchy and nervous, darting in and out of the quarry road.
Maybe a car hit it?
The Walker looked over to the roadway and then back at the animal and finally braved walking up to it for a closer look. What he saw made him back off and nearly trip himself over a bush. Around its neck was some kind of leash.
He took his route on a dewy morning and kept his usual brisk pace. Step, breathe, step, exhale, step, breathe, step, exhale. This repetitious cadence created a therapeutic and soothing ritual.
With his mind left to no longer ponder the passing of the "items" on the roadway near the quarry drive, the Walker found himself daydreaming about the coming season and cooler dryer temperatures and feeling generally right with the world.
He hadn't gone more than a couple dozen steps when his brow furrowed as he caught something out of place near the bushes off the roadway. Part of him wanted to know what was there, and a very powerful part of him urged, keep going! But instinct had him turn his head and the Walker stopped so quickly, he nearly stumbled.
At first, he wasn't sure he was seeing this. The Walker's head jerked up and he looked around him for others. Of course, being a quiet country road, he was the only one around. When he looked again, he realized it wasn't just a dead dog, but a doberman. A couple of dobermans had been running loose along the roadways for some time now, acting kind of twitchy and nervous, darting in and out of the quarry road.
Maybe a car hit it?
The Walker looked over to the roadway and then back at the animal and finally braved walking up to it for a closer look. What he saw made him back off and nearly trip himself over a bush. Around its neck was some kind of leash.
The Walker studied it closer and realized that it was no leash, it was some kind of cording. It looked to be duct tape, tied together in knots to make some kind of leash or... noose?
The Walker tried to observe it objectively, without taking in the fact that a vulnerable stray dog was killed. He knew damn well it wasn't a car that took the dog down, not with a rigged rope around its neck. In fact, as he studied it, it looked like someone stood behind the bush and tossed the body on the makeshift rope out where it would be seen.
No, this was definitely not hit by a car....
It was killed by someone and it appeared that a large stretch of its hide was ripped off purposefully. There was no blood or signs of having been eaten by a wild animal or anything else, just a purposefully killed stray dog, left out in plain sight, and a "trophy" piece of flesh removed. If he didn't know better, it looked like photos of cattle mutilations he'd seen on TV documentaries where they were bloodless kills and part of their hide missing.
(Cattle mutilation example)
The Walker admittedly had to pull out his cell and take pictures of it. It gave him the heebie jeebies to think that when he felt the threat was over and the stalker had moved on, it was upping its game. It no longer wanted the interaction back and forth of the skull, mandible and other bones, and with the opportunity for back and forth over, it was sending a message.
But what?
The Walker looked around, saw no one on the quiet country roadway. He straightened up and did something he was loathe to do, he went back down the roadway from where he came rather than completing his circuit. He swore he wouldn't let it bother him or make him show an obvious change in his pattern, but today he couldn't stomach what he just witnessed and he felt a need to check on his own dogs.
Was there something he could have done? They had so many stray dogs in the countryside and, yes, the dobermans had been acting strangely, but then most strays were cagey and unapproachable. In a rural setting, it was sometimes hard to tell who was stray and who was just a neighbor's new dog acquisition that romped the roadways chasing squirrels and such. It was common to feed any animals that came to one's door.
This was no act of nature, but of man... or intelligent beast?
The Walker tightened his jaw, shook his head and refused to imagine that anything but some sick teenager-soon-to-be serial killer would do something like that. Yet, he had never heard of a would-be killer putting his animal practice victims out for people to find along a roadway, or taking a strip of hide as a souvenir, or using packing tape to make a rope when he likely had a belt, a piece of rope, a dog leash or other items at his disposal. Nor did the Walker know of serial killers who tinkered on people's properties doing random things, leaving intact snake spines or playing back and forth with bones and skulls like a bored creature of the woods.
But could a Bigfoot do something like that? Weren't they supposed to be shy benevolent creatures? Maybe they had some assholes among their kind, just like humans did?
It was then that the Walker realized in the back of his mind, he always thought it was some kind of shy giant hoping to offer him up killings of things that might harm him, like wild boars or snakes, some kind of symbol of friendship in a perverse way that perhaps only his kind would appreciate.
The presentation of the murdered dog, however, changed the tone of the many months of attempted interactions.
The Walker hiked away, telling himself that perhaps the stalker just wanted to show him that his own dogs, he often walked the roadway with, were safe from strays.
Still, deep inside, he knew that tomorrow's walk was going to be most uncomfortable. If the body was still there, he was going to call it in. He just wanted to poke around and see if there were any other victims to report. He knew from experience this thing tended to do a few hits at a time, like the boars and the snakes, but he was not in a mood to go looking for more gore today. It was all he could do to not run the last yards to his home.
He slept fitfully that night as if his very psyche knew that tomorrow would not bring relief, but only more torment to the puzzle that was his once quiet hometown.
And, the Walker's assumption of more gore being found would be an underestimation when the dawn came the next day....
