[Tom Watowski, journal entry]

What is complete? It’s impossible to say when this monster began its hunting of humans in the first place, any more than I could classify it as anything other than (as Sullivan would have it) a demon. You’d have to ask it yourself for more information than that. Not that I’ve ever heard it speak. I haven’t seen any sign it can.

The dead man who Sullivan originally bought the land from, he could have been, for all we know, just another in an endless line of its victims. It was an estate sale, after all. We don’t have a lot of information about the previous owner. Nevertheless, Sullivan was able to buy the land all those years ago at a cheap price, and it was just two years after that when he sold a parcel of it to me. As to who exactly the monster has or hasn’t killed, there’s always uncertainty. I believe I’ve found six, so far, six with decent evidence. It hasn’t been easy. I don’t believe there’s anyone more knowledgeable in the seemingly natural and unnatural deaths linked to this region than I am. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who’s ever attempted to investigate this thing. Sullivan’s wife, Anne Greer, was its latest victim. Of that, I’m certain. The earliest I’ve found dates back some hundred years or so. When stepping into the realm of the impossible, it’s important to arm yourself with facts. With concrete evidence. It’s the only defense against madness.

Here’s an essential fact I cling to now: I still have two children. Hopefully, they’ll be the inheritors of this notebook, so let me address the two of you directly. I’m sorry Syd, Nadine. The haze of my life wasn’t always as thick as it is now. I was once a young man, believe it or not. Tiffany was still a waitress when I met her, working her way through nursing school at the time, always busy, exhausted, focused. Everything, in short, I wasn’t.

I’d lived in Lansing for almost three years, skipping classes at the community college, working part time, all while using the money my parent’s had saved up for my education to binge drink, smoke weed, and make rent (in that order). I know you have some inkling of what I was like from your mother, but I’m being frank with you about it so that when I tell you the unbelievable things I have to tell you, maybe you’ll have an easier time accepting them. From the start, your mother and I were never very compatible. Tiffany’s idea of a good time involved dinner and hikes, and mine, before meeting her, was a night of bar hopping. Still, she came into my life at a turning point. The freedom I’d been clawing for since adolescence was beginning to ring hollower than ever, and here she was, a paragon of direction and purpose.

For a month or so, I came into the diner fairly regularly, alone or with a few friends, but always trying to take advantage of the rare opportunity to make an impression on her. The morning crowd was retired and boisterous, and when I finally got up the nerve to ask your mother out on a date, it was only at the behest of a very sweet old lady in the booth next to me. She’d taken it on herself to play matchmaker. Apparently, my interest had been hard to miss that morning. Tiffany and I’s seemingly casual conversation about her nursing degree was pushed into an awkward agreement that yes, I would like to take her out. I found her number written on the check.

Being three years older, your mother was well past the sort of immature games young people play in relationships. She wanted something real, and I wanted to impress her, so we found ourselves meeting each other’s families within six months. Mine were still so upset that I’d put college on hold that they immediately clung to her, my mother especially, as though she were exactly the sort of life preserver her little boy needed (she always saw me that way). I can’t describe how strange it was for them to approve of anything, much less of a girlfriend. Something about the speed of it all, the breakneck rubber-stamping of every inconsequential decision, didn’t allow for much by way of reflection. Between the two of us, our friends, our families, nobody bothered to ask the most essential question: were we actually well matched?

For eight years, through an engagement, a wedding, and two pregnancies, the question mutated and metastasized. It came out in fights, in icy silences, it hung behind an unspoken veil in the background. When it finally emerged into full view, it did so in the worst way. Your mother, for her part, probably believed in our marriage for longer than I did, even after she started her prolonged affair with another nurse. It was discreet enough, I suppose. She wasn’t pretending to be in love with him, any more than he was with her. Still, it hurt. By then, there were already plenty of excuses for resentment on both sides. Her work, for one thing, was taxing, but it was essential to making our house and car payments, while my jobs were, one after another, a flight from boredom. Looking back on it, I realize now that she was the one holding it all together: the childcare decisions, the finances, even the food we ate. I can’t really blame her too much for seeking out some kind of comfort as I slowly lost control. The fact is, my problem had been getting much worse. I’d always drank, but the dependency and shame of my excess was becoming harder and harder to manage. I would stop at bars on the way home for a nightcap, and wind up staying late for more. As much as it hurt to discover her affair, the betrayal amounted to a major wake up call.

After she confirmed paternity for the two of you, I was ready to storm out of the city. I had had enough of the tension and lies. I wanted to disappear. My small inheritance, voluntarily halved in the quickest divorce proceedings known to man, was just enough to get me started up here. But even in the summer, despite my willingness to move anywhere north of the bridge, jobs were incredibly hard to come by. When a clothing store here in Manistique finally offered me solid, year-round employment, I jumped at the chance. And so began a new life, a new chapter.   

The quiet up here, believe it or not, the clean break from every enabler and acquaintance I’d accumulated, did wonders for me. I stopped drinking altogether, like a mindless cycle had been interrupted. No resolutions or declarations necessary. Fresh air and lakeshore and work. Simplicity. Still, I missed the two of you more than I can say. It’s the one thing I really missed, honestly. Syd, you were just getting ready to start the first grade when I left, and I thought about you every day, about what you might be thinking and doing. And Nadine, I grieved all the milestones I was missing, like your first steps. But then, I’d missed Syd’s too. I believed at that time that letting go of this momentum might be dangerous. For the first time in a long time, I was in control. I didn’t want to lose it.

It was almost an entire year before I saw you again. To your mother's credit, she drove you up herself, although I know she wanted to personally check out my living situation before leaving you here. It’s understandable. Syd, you were upset, to say the least. You didn’t want to stay at all. It terrified you. You cried and shouted, hitting me, wriggling out of my grasp to chase after your mother’s car. I only had one arm to try to keep hold of you, and Nadine started crying too, so I had to set her down and chase after you down the street. I picked you up and carried you back on my shoulder. Your face was so red. I’ve never seen you so angry in my life. I’m sure you’re wondering, why am I mentioning this now? Why revisit such a difficult day at all? We had good days, too, I want you to remember those. There was fishing and swimming and I always tried to give you both a space for yourselves here. I know it was never ideal. I know you blamed me for a lot. And I deserve a lot of that blame. My goal isn’t to expunge anything.

But this is where I have to tell you things you may not believe. Things that most people would find impossible to believe. This is where my account starts to sound insane. It should. My picture of reality is fractured, somehow. Firstly, categorically, I never hit you kids, nor your mother. I never would have done such a thing. My own father hit me really hard once, and on more than one occasion, he was violent towards my mother. I’ve always hated him for it. No matter how much I drank back when I lived with Tiffany, no matter how plastered I was as I stumbled into the house in the middle of the night, I never forgot the hardest lesson my father had ever taught me. That a man who hurts someone weaker than himself is not a man at all.

I say this to you because that day, the first day you came up here, is a day I now hold two distinct memories of. In one, Syd, I lift you up and carry you screaming over my shoulder to the yard, to where Nadine is standing in the grass, crying. The other version is difficult for me to even write down, though the creature is standing there in it, marking it as false. I can see its leathery, alien nakedness, that eyeless gaze from empty sockets, the indentations where ears and nose should be, and those long, many-jointed fingers, its unholy mouth and wet lips whispering endlessly. It’s like it’s still interacting with the memory, even now. How it grabbed my neck, forcefully, the evil of it. Its hand was like a dead hand. The head tilted the way a dog’s would, and then the other hand slid down my arm, cable strong. It molded my hand and it swung my arm. It whispers.

This isn't the first memory infected by the creature. I see it in the rooms of my childhood, in nightmares, anywhere. Increasingly, I see it in this house. But this one fragment with you Syd, more so than any other it’s been in, has terrified me. Could it actually change your reality? I would never have thought so. I didn’t believe it could happen until the last time I talked to you. Your attitude on the phone was suddenly different. Just a few months before, we’d had a good conversation. We were conciliatory, remember? I know you’ve always believed me the cause of your problems, and that part of you hates me the way I hated my own father, but we did manage to laugh together on that call, we joked around, we talked about going camping sometime, after the snow thaws. But the next time you called, you were suddenly so argumentative. After a few questions, you accused me of hitting you all those years ago. You said you remember being in the street and that I hurt you. Hearing you say it, it shook me to my foundation. I actually accused you of making it up, of saying so out of spite. I’m sorry for that. How could you know the other version? It’s beyond my understanding.

[End of entry, page break]