Subject: DON’T MISS THIS
Believe me. Though honestly, I’m starting to think that’s too much to ask from people these days. And can I disagree? I don’t believe myself half the time so maybe its true. I, Daren Walker, am crazy.
I live in a small but cozy house with my parents. It’s always been the three of us together… well technically that’s wrong if you count my brother who went away for college just last month and my twin sister I would’ve had if she hadn’t died of leukemia when I was 2 years old. My dad doesn’t like to talk about her and mom just doesn’t bring it up ever. I’ve come to terms with it though, I’m 18. I have to.
I’ve always hated the electricity in here. It cuts out randomly during the day and pisses me off royally when I’m trying to do something. I have to change out the bulbs in here ever few months since they blow their fuses frequently with the power cuts and surges. Sometimes the electricity cuts off for days, perks of living on a hill.
That night I was laying in my bed at night trying to sleep. I was having trouble sleeping those past couple of days probably because of stress about college. I hear subtle chatter from the living room. It wasn’t too late for mom and dad to be still up. They would always watch TV late at night in their room. I tried forcing myself to catch some Zs and did manage to get a small nap before I hear a loud bang outside the house. Startled, I ran to the front door and see the power generator catching fire. Soon enough the fire department and electricians arrived to fix the issue. Great. No electricity for who knows how long. I go back to bed miserable and tired out of my mind.
In the morning, we had breakfast and then parents left for work as usual. Dad worked as an officer in the county police and mom worked as a nurse in the hospital. They both would leave and come home together since their shifts conveniently were pretty much identical. Me and my brother would on a normal day just play some games or talk about me going to college but due to the fact that he would probably be in class, I couldn’t do that. Not that it would’ve mattered anyway, I need power for that.
Bored, I was going through old boxes we had lying in the attic when I came across what seemed like one of our old family albums. My dad was big on clicking photos and saving them as memories so we had a lot of albums. I wished he started earlier though, the earliest photos I have are when me and my brother turned 3. This one album, seemed really old. I opened it up but the pages were basically unreadable and the pictures were very distorted and I couldn’t really see anything in them. I definitely hadn’t seen this album before. So, I decided to keep it with me as I sorted out the other old stuff.
The next day I went to the corner DVD store where I knew this guy who worked a lot with photographs. I brought the album to him and to my surprise, he said that he could recover the distorted photos. I thought it would a great gift for the parents and paid him $25 upfront for the recovery and he told me that they would be ready in a day. I met my dad on the way home in his car probably going to pick up mom from the hospital, he offered to pick me up and I agreed. He asked what I was doing in the DVD store but I didn’t tell him about the photos since I wanted to keep them a surprise. I told him that there were just DVDs I had to drop by for repair.
We made our way to the hospital where we went to pickup my mom from her office. It’d been a while since I had been there. There were photos of the four of us everywhere across the walls of the office. Mom was packing her stuff and as I looked around, I found a diary in one of her drawers. I don’t know why, I decided to pack it along with me.
We drove home and I started going through the diary in my room. It was a journal but it hadn’t been updated for years. Mom had used this diary as a daily journal and noted down all her daily doings. The earliest entry I could find was March 8th 2005. That was 3 days after my 2nd birthday. It only had one line written on the whole page: “So it ends, and so it begins.” I didn’t get what it meant.
The next day I stopped by the DVD store to pickup the album. The guy at the store handed me the album and said: “It was pretty hard to recover some of those. You sure these degraded naturally?” I nodded and walked out. As I entered my room, I opened the album. It had pictures of my first birthday. I was surprised as dad told me he didn’t even have a camera back then. The first photo was labelled: Daren and Axel’s first birthday. And what I saw, I couldn’t believe.
It was a picture of me and Alex in two cradles and mom and dad standing on either side smiling… well at least dad was. My mom had a sober look about her face as she dead straight at the camera. That’s when I noticed something strange. Where was Judith? Where was my triplet sister? I flipped through the pages seeing different photos of me and Alex but there was not a single photo of Judith anywhere. Sweat forming on by brown and with hasty hands I kept flipping through.
As I reached the last page, a photo fell out from the album. It was a photo of a headstone marked:
“Samantha Walker”
I dropped the album and fell on the bed. With watery eyes I was petrified of what I just saw. Samantha is my mom’s name. I pulled myself together and flipped through the last pages. The last photo of the album was a couple photo of dad and mom and the caption read: “Grayson and Judith Walker.”
I called the hospital’s reception and got a response after an hour of waiting on the phone regarding my questions: “Your mother had a miscarriage; your sister was an underdeveloped baby that started to disappear in CT scans past 6 months. Your mother handled the news pretty well, almost as if, she had accepted her. During the delivery, all that remained of her were some unrecognizable bones and some flesh which your mom took it upon herself to bury. The blood from the sample was seemed to be your mom’s but your mother’s new DNA results have signs of mutation which is uncommon. This is all that I could gather from your childbirth report and notes.”
Mom… or Judith found out about it and I met her at home trying to discuss regarding the topic. She didn’t say a word. All she did was listen to me completely expressionless. When I was finished with my rant, she tilted her head slightly and smiled very creepily. She did nothing else. Just sat there, looking into my eyes, smiling the widest most creepy smile I’ve ever seen. I packed my stuff and left immediately. As I left through the door, I saw her sitting in the same spot with the same smile turning her head towards the door. I ran off and never looked back.
Days later I received a courier at my hotel room I had moved into. It was a VHS tape which I recognized belonged to my parents. Along with them was a note by my dad:
“Daren, it was about time you figured it out. Judith has been forcing me to watch this tape every single night with her in our room at night. It’s a tape of her having a seizure during the miscarriage and smiling all the way through. She told me to watch it every single night threatening to kill everyone in the house. She doesn’t know where you live yet. By the time you receive this, she’ll probably have killed me already. Save yourself. Love, Dad”
As I write this, I’m getting a knock on my door and its 2:44am. I know it’s her. She’s tracked the VHS courier. She’s here for me. I’m writing this so that you’d know what happened. Move to a new place as soon as you read this and you just might survive. I’m going to answer the door now.
Daren
--Attached: seizure.mp4
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