October 11th
Never kept a diary before, thought it was something girls did in their teens, but I can't remember shit anymore and like reminiscin. This laptop here is also password protected, a little better than those locks with heart shaped keys. My nephew gave me his old laptop- I ain't much of a computer guy, but I guess he had his Reddit thing runnin. Looks like he's a writer of sorts, posts some stuff here. I don't care much for what he writes truth be told, but the kid got me hooked on this site, and I thank him for it nonetheless. These stories here on Nosleep make passing downtime out here in the Middle Of Nowhere Montana downright enjoyable, and them being free ain't too bad neither.
October 12th
Two sheep nearly ran off. Changed a taillight in my truck. Drank a fifth of Jack and fired up my old my old tapes, tried to find a porn stash on this laptop, but there nothing but thousands of texts, 2,483 to be exact. Some of them make my friggin skin crawl. I don't think my nephew wrote any of them. It's making me paranoid, makin me hear stuff, like scratching and thudding under the house. Maybe a bobcat got set up down there. Least that's what I hope. Looks like I gotta go down there...this is my last entry if things go South Ha Ha
Oct 13th
Nothing under the house but something's livin down in the dirt, its all hard and hallowed out. There's a smell down there, like burning glue or frying whizz, something almighty wrong. I'm herdin the animals all in the barn tonight, can't risk any of 'em being nabbed. I can barley pay the bank as it is.
Oct 15
Bruce- the best damn lab to grace Gods cruel Earth...this morning, I saw a spot of blood on where Bruce sleeps. Whatever killed him didn't wake two skittish horses, 30 sheep, 10 chickens and another big eared sheepdog who slept right through the whole thing. Whatever it was had taken it covered its tracks. I know a cougar or a rabid wolf didn't do this to Bruce. I suspect people, but these people were more careful than Swiss spies, not like the assholes who steal some ranchers animals for sacrifice or whatnot. My nearest neighbors are twenty miles away. Cops are crooked here. I'm on my own
Oct 16th
I camped out in the barn, hidden up in the lofts with a soviet rifle I'm not too proud too say, but when it came to cheap and guaranteed bloodshed, I had it covered. And after loosing Bruce, I wanted to spill it. Nothing happened all night, and I nodded off only minutes at a time. After the sun had finally come up, I smelled something burning by the house.
I saw smoke billowing out of the propane BBQ, and my gut knew what it was before my brain wanted to make a guess. I lifted the top to see Bruce, quartered, decapped, gutted, and sizzling on the high flames like some friggin cow. The circular little gnaw marks on his ribcage were human, no mistaking.
I shouted, asking the bastards where they were. I fired of about a dozen rounds into the air and into the ground to mean business. I dragged out the padded jaw bear traps for around the barn and dug a dozen or more Apache foot traps infront of the entrances after herding everything under the same roof again. I wasn't there the first time, and that's where I messed up, but not again. I padlocked every door. I know they are living somewhere on my land, and there ain't any places to hide other than the house and the barn. I got a feelin I’ll get 'em tonight.
October 17th
I kept up in the lofts again while my sheepdog Bolt slept down with the animals. I guess I feel asleep because I woke up in the middle of a nightmare that it was morning where every animal had its guts ripped out, and to the sound of Bolt yapping and biting at something. I shined my flashlight down to see the back door wide open and something carryin him out. I ran out and followed the barking before I heard a heavy snap. Then there was a groaning, whining cry of a child.
I stepped around the my own holes and held the light on him. I couldn't believe how skinny the kid was, I mean starvation skinny. I don't think he had clothes, just piles of old dirty drapes, towels, blankets, anything to hide his shame. His feet were bound up in rags, one of which had the trap biting into the padding. His eyes were wider than the sky, with a kind of wild unknown fear you reserve for alien monsters. He was still holdin onto Bolt, and for a second I thought he was going to bite off the dogs ear before it squirmed out of his arms and broke away. The kid started to shout something that sounded like “Dallex, Dallex, Dallex!”
Any thought of me spillin any blood went right out. This kid was frightened out of his mind, but he still retained some of that innocence that said that there were good people in the world. Lord help me, I felt nothing but pity for the kid, though he had Bolt in his dirty little hands.
I went up to the kid, couldn't have been more than six, and told him to stay calm and not to twist his foot in the trap. His mouth hung open in stupid dumb fear. Most kids I know would be bawling their heads off, but this one just looked at his ankle gap-mouthed. I could smell his rotting gray teeth from where I stood.
“It's gonna be alright” I said right before my left leg was smacked with stone. I hadn't felt that kind of sting since me and my mean ass cousin used to launch cherry bombs at each other. I fell down along with someone else behind me. I scrambled for my rifle and then my light, shining upon a woman was creeping up behind me. She was dressed like the kid, in rags from curtains to flags I ain't never seen before. There was nasty bubbly scar on her neck that still looked kinda infected. She absolutely reeked of something that smelled like sweet gasoline. In her hand was was a slingshot- if her leg didn't go down to the hip in the foot trap, she would have drove that stone right in my brain, just for tryin to save the kid.
She held up her hands, but her thumb didn't let go of the slingshot in her hand.
She said something like "we're dresser omner volt, not scavenges, not sabers." I told her to throw down her slingshot, and I'll help the kid out of the trap. She did like I asked, and croaked, I mean like frog trying to speak, “Aid us”.
These weren't mean teenagers or satanists. They looked like they broke out of a gulag and marched death valley without a drop or water or sliver of food between them. All I had to do to was wait until the traps did them in, if I wanted it that way. But these...people, they looked wrong. Smelled weird, and spoke strangely, but something told me to show them charity. Guess I still have a bit of Sunday school teachin somewhere in me.
I cracked the trap open on the kid- he walked with a limp, but the padded trap didn't seem to break any bones. He ran to his mother and tried to yank her out himself, but she was dead and limp, her eyes wet with tears, a sight of pure exhaustion. I had to put my face right next to those rags that reeked like acidy shit locked inside a refrigerator for 2 weeks, sulfur and rust layered by the caked smell of body odor, and slid my hand down the hole across her leg, a little hairy and muscly, like she had been born walkin and never stopped, removed the sharp sticks out of the Earth and lifted her up in a single easy pull. She was long, over six feet, but she couldn't have scratched 90 pounds.
As soon as they were free, I expected them to run, but both looked like they were in no condition from how they rubbed their left ankles. I asked them their names and only got those blank looks back. The woman pointed with her pinky at the boy, saying "Stugg", and using her hang-10 thumb to point at herself and say “Dallex”.
I pitied them but I didn't trust them yet. I assumed they killed my one dog and tried for the other, but mother-son vagrants are rare and don't usually come concentration camp thin. They looked helpless, but I worried it was a ploy. Who knew if poppa wasn't around the corner with a big friggin stick.
I was about to point them towards the highway and tell them to beat it and never show their faces again, but instead I heard myself asking if they would like something to eat instead. More blank looks. I made a shoveling and eating motion with my mouth and pointed to my house. They both nodded.
They stood nervously in the front door mudroom as I heated some turkey mash and gave them a four paper plates worth. They had sat cross legged in the 6'x6' mud room while the woman fished a spoon head welded to a wrench and handed it to the boy, while the woman ate with fingers that were nearly jet black.
They ate two more plates a piece. When I filled up a cup of water and handed it to the boy, the woman grabbed it away as if it were acid and gave me a concerned, stern look as she dug into her dingy ashy robes for a hard black plastic stick and dipped it into the water. When nothing happened, she sniffed the glass, then took a taste while staring at me in the eyes, then a sip, and then a deep drink. After a few reflective seconds, she asked me something like "Mashana scale?", and my confusion seemed to satisfy her. She took another sip and handed it to the boy, who drank two more glasses.
I was able to get them to the bathroom, where I turned on the shower and they jumped back. She placed that black little swizzle stick into the water again, looked at it and then touched the stream comin out the showerhead like it was a thousand degrees. They nodded again, and both her and the boy took off all they had on them like it was all being carried by a single tie. I didn't mean to stare at their naked bodies, but there they were before me- the kid had a long black tattoo on the side of his leg made up dots and lines, the woman had more of those welts on her body, bubbly and raw and sewn with dirty black string. She had a tattoo on the back of her hamstring, a complex lookin grid maze. There was another on her shoulder, but it was just a solid black box, like it was coverin up something. Both were made of spiny angles, of backbones, ribs, and hipbones, and were so dirty I couldn't tell their real skin color.
I left and they showered for nearly an hour while I sacked up their clothes in 3 trashbags that didn't stop the smell from leechin out.
And now i'm here, typin away on the desk in my spare bedroom, where Stugg and Dallex followed me. If I go downstairs, they follow me there, and they wait outside the door when I'm in the john. Stugg is sleepin on the bare bed with the biggest smile I have ever seen from a kid while Dallex is sitting on the ledge by the window, looking at the full moon over the scrub hills, like she's watching for something.
Guess I'll sleep here tonight.
October 17th
When we were eating eggs and toast in the kitchen together, I asked Dallex where she came from. When she didn't seem to understand, I pointed to Montana on the taped up map on the side of the fridge. She blinked and pointed to the middle of the gulf of mexico and slid her fingers to Montana. Then she looked at the calendar, back at me, and then picked up the pen taped on the twine and crossed out “2015”, and wrote “2101.”
Then I started to notice more things about them, now that they were cleaned and dressed in my old clothes. The kid's right eye was gray, like he had a fake eye made of solid silver. Both had a tuft of hair by their ears that ended in a pinprick of light. They had nothing like a coin or a piece of technology out of of place, not even the black stick Dallex used to check the water- it just looked like a boring black piece of plastic, nothing that said they came 86 years years from the future.
When I asked where they were before coming here, she sketched a two roads coming together at a balancing bolder on the back of an old envelope. She was a good artist, and I recognized it as the nearest crossroads to my home. But she drew a church that wasn't there before. I asked her to take me there by pointing and tapping her drawing. I could tell she didn't want to, but eventually comforted Stugg, gave him her slingshot, and walked out of the door.
When we were a few hundred feet from the house, she tried her best to speak. She said words like thanking, bed, refresa, which I guessed was food and drink. When I asked why she ate my dog, she said “only trust”. I have my personal theories on what that meant. That's all we said as I walked and she limped while holding onto my shoulder to my truck, and then the fifteen miles down to the intersection. I could tell she hated being inside the truck, and bolted out of it when we stopped.
And sure as a drunk uncle at a Christmas party, there the church was, down to the last detail she drew. It was a one roomer with a fifteen fo steeple and boarded up windows wasn't there last time I drove by, and judging from the white paint that peeled at every edge, it had stood here a mighty long time. When I tried to go inside, she gripped my shoulder so tight I thought she was going to punch through the skin, shaking her head so badly I thought it was going to fly off. Whatever was inside, she didn't want me to see.
October 18th
I left the two to come back to the church on my own just before dawn. I brought my rifle, and kept her steady when I opened the unlocked front door. Nothing was inside but a bunch of old pews, a podium and a back door. I opened the backdoor to the outside, but it wasn't the Montana. It wasn't anything I ever saw or smelled before. I'm a rancher, not a writer, but even if I was a poet, I don't think any combination of words could describe how strange that world was.
It was dark and cold and silent as a coffin festering deep under the earth. Then there was a voice. It was soft, but not nice. It reminded me of a hunter's call. Something said “We are here to help you. Please, let us know where you are. We want to help you. Please don't hide.”
I shut the door and walked out of the church feelin like I got hit by a train. I didn't need to tell Dallex where I was. That sour, worried look on her face told me she knew I went back. Worst of all, she knew I had to go back again.
I got some thinking to do.
October 23rd
I don't know how much Dallex and Stugg understood when I showed her how feed and sheer the sheep and care for the chickens, but they understood when I gave them the keys and saw my huge backpack and rifle. She was crying the whole morning, and refused to let go of my arm, but...
But. But if they are from 2101, I gotta see it. I gotta see what made that world what it was, and who was talking. These two will make do here, I hope, until the bank comes after not getting it's payments and they find them. But that's nonsense, I'll be back by then. I won't go far, I just want to see what's on the other side. I promise not to loose sight of the church.
If I come back, I can be famous. If. Can.
After puttin this online, spelling errors and country grammar mistakes and, just so someone will know what happened to Franklin Ganes. Then, I'm going to that church, and I'm not coming back until I know what's going on. Maybe I'm crazy- but I know one thing: I'll go crazy not knowing what's on the other side of that door.
Say a prayer for me, you. If there is a you.
Submitted December 06, 2015 at 02:32AM by IamHowardMoxley http://ift.tt/1OMYdaj nosleep
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