The details of all of the events that I need to share are no longer clear in my head, and they become more and more muddled everyday. I need to write them down, to share them, to get them out of my damn head. I believe that I am safe now; but that wasn’t always the case, and I didn’t even realize it.
I suppose that anytime anyone tells a story the best place to start is at the beginning, but where do you start when you don’t actually know where the beginning is? I will start with the most important events as I see them and try to piece things together from there. You’ll have to put the rest together yourself.
My name is Daniel, and when all of this happened I was living in a medium-sized town in southeast Wisconsin. In this area, like in much of Wisconsin, winters are long and sometimes hard, and I hate them. There's something about snow that just makes the winter more unbearable; wet, cold, blinding. Like getting caught in a downpour but worse. It makes me feel lost and unsafe.
While growing up, my family didn’t have many traditions. But one that we did have was that, every other Friday night, we would order pizza -- always from the same place, Bob’s Pizza; and always with the same toppings, sausage and pepperoni. When I was younger my dad would go and pick up the pizza because we lived out in the country and Bob refused to deliver out to us. As we grew older that responsibility fell to each of my siblings, first my brother, then my sister, and finally down to me.
The drive to get the pizza was about a 45 minute round trip in good weather, and in the worst weather would take around an hour. Most of the time I actually cherished the opportunity to get out of the house and make the trip, especially as a young person who had just gotten his license. As the years progressed, my brother and sister moved away, but my parents continued the tradition. Since I stayed pretty much in the area, I still participated in the Friday pizza night. Sometimes I would pick up the pizza before heading out to my parents, others I would go out to their house early and then head back into town on the pizza run.
One night, I had decided to go out to my parents’ house early on Friday, and I decided I would head into town later when it was time to get the pizza. It was late October, I think, which even in Wisconsin made it very strange when a heavy amount of snow started falling from the sky. I had no concern that the snow was going to stick to the road, which meant that the driving conditions wouldn’t change a great deal, just some reduced visibility. I left my parents’ house at 6 PM, planning for about a fifty minute round trip.
At six, the sun had already completed most of its descent below the horizon and I knew that the return trip would be in the dark of night. If you have ever driven through a decent snowstorm at night in the country, you know that using your brights creates an amazing effect, almost like the one that old Star Wars movies used to demonstrate a ship moving into warp speed. The trip into town was no big deal, visibility was somewhat difficult, but as I had expected, the snow was not sticking to the road, and so all that I had to deal with was wet.
I arrived at the pizza place at 6:30. Since we were regular customers at Bob’s, the pizza was already waiting for pickup; it took about 5 minutes to pay for it because of a small line. I remember looking at the clock readout above the door as I left and it said 6:36. Given the trip into town, I figured that I would arrive back at my parents’ house no later than 7:15. As I drove out into the country I turned my car’s brights on since it was pitch black, and deer like to move at that time of year. At once, that strange “warp speed” effect kicked in. As I stared into the flying snow I tried paying as much attention as I could to my surroundings. It was hard though, so hard to pull my eyes from the bright lights, and the hypnotic snow that they illuminated.
When I arrived back at my parents, they were waiting for me, and they were mad.
My dad thundered at me,“Where have you been? Did you get lost? Were you in an accident?”
“No,” I responded, confused. “What are you talking about, I’ve been gone barely an hour?”
My mom had a very concerned look on her face. “Daniel, you’ve been gone for almost three hours, it’s almost nine.” I looked at the clock readout on the microwave, and it read 8:55. I had been gone for nearly three hours and I had no idea where that extra time had gone. There was absolutely no way that I had been gone that long! I told my parents that I had left the pizza place at 6:36, and said that if I had been gone for that long that there was no way that the pizza would still be warm. I could feel the warmth radiating from the boxes that I was holding, and handed them to my parents. Again my mother had that look on her face: “Dan, this pizza is stone cold, I’m going to have to put it into the oven to reheat it.”
“No way!” I opened the top box and took a slice, and sure enough the pizza was cold, as if it had been sitting in a refrigerator for hours. I had absolutely no idea what had happened. I’m sure that my parents just assumed that I had done something else that I didn’t want to tell them about after getting the pizza. We sat in silence while the pizza reheated, ate, and then went to bed. The pizza trip wasn’t brought up again.
That winter was the winter from hell. It seemed like every other Friday night it snowed, and every time it snowed I would show up hours later than what should have been possible and without any ability to explain where I had been. I remember that winter that year lasted longer than normal as well; it went well into April.
On a Friday night in mid April, I went for what would be the last pizza run for my family. Again, it began snowing, which was damned crazy. Again I made the trip without incident, using my brights on the way home, the hypnotic snow falling in front of my car. When I arrived back at my parents house I noticed that all of the lights were out. It was odd, but not too odd, as I had grown to expect those “lost hours” of time, as I’d come to think of them. I looked at the clock on the microwave; I was right. It had been several hours again. I was really ready for winter to end, hoping that those lost hours would end with it. I called for my parents that the pizza was here but there was no answer. I sat down in the living room on a couch that had an outside view through a window and I could see the snow falling. I didn’t turn any lights on; my parents’ bedroom adjoined the living room and my dad was a pretty light and crabby sleeper. I stared out the window, ate pizza, watched the falling snow, and tried to piece together the lost hours.
A little while later there was a knock on the door to the house. I went and answered it. At the door stood two police officers. “Can I help you?” I asked. Looking past them, I realized that the snow had stopped.
The first officer, a huge man, answered in a deep baritone: “Is Mark here? He hasn’t shown up to work in a few days and people are worried about him.”
I looked at the officer. “I’m Mark’s son, Daniel. I’m afraid I don’t understand, he worked today, and tomorrow is Saturday so he wouldn’t even need to be at work.”
I could tell by the look on the officers’ faces that they were as confused as I was. The second officer, a young woman, responded: “Well, Daniel, are you okay?”
“Yeah of course,” I said. “I'm absolutely fine.”
“Did something happen?”
“No, what do you mean did something happen? My parents are just in bed.”
“Daniel, today is Wednesday, not Friday. Is it alright if we come inside?”
I stepped to the side. I was more concerned with how it was now Wednesday when I had sat down with the pizza on Friday night. How had I lost almost five whole days? What was going on? Then, I heard the lady officer scream:
“Jesus fucking Christ!” She started retching. I lifted my head to see her run from the living room covering her mouth, and the huge officer heading straight for me.
I think there must have been a part of me that knew something was wrong. I didn’t even react when the huge officer tackled me to the ground and placed me under arrest, asking me why I did it. I had no clue what the officer was talking about. The officer dragged me up off the floor with my hands behind my back and led me into the living room. There, on either side of the couch that I had just been sitting on, were my parents.
Or, what was left of them.
Their bodies were slumped down into the couch. Their insides hung down over the side of the couch and onto the floor. As for their heads… Just the lower jaw remained attached to the body. The other part of their heads were lying in pools of blood on the back of the couch. Then I looked down and saw that I was covered in blood, much more than I would have picked up by just sitting down in between them.
I heard the huge officer call me a sick fuck as he lead me from the house. I was placed in the police car and a crime scene unit was brought out. I asked a different officer why they needed a crime scene guy, and his response unnerved me more than any other: “Oh, you know what you’ve been up to you piece of shit.”
I didn’t though. I had no damn idea what was going on. At one point, still sitting in the squad car, an officer approached my vehicle and popped the trunk. I knew he wouldn’t find anything in there, I never used the trunk. So imagine my surprise when the officer began to remove more than a dozen crusty sets of blood soaked clothes that I could not explain.
I hate winter.
Submitted October 13, 2017 at 11:21PM by AcesSlevin http://ift.tt/2ygA2kY nosleep
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