I should explain how I began on my...run. Everyone explains themselves at some point. I was a child. And everyman. A simple person. I had a full house: a family; that included my mother, father, my brothers, and my sister. My parents were literature professors who happened to have the last name of "Lear." They took the chance and named us all after tragic characters (bitterly, I have thought of these names as bad omens, in the past). I am Thomas because, as the eldest, my father wanted to name me after my great-grandfather, Thomas Vincent Lear III. My middle name is "Edgar," however; Edgar, son of Gloucester, was tricked into running away...similarly to me. My younger twin brothers' names were Kent and Oswald (Ozzy). My sister's name was Elle Regan Lear; Elle was my mother's sister's name. Aunt Elle went mad, two years later, and was locked up in the nearest facility. She ranted about tragedy, clung to us kids, refusing us to go "back to meet him." I had no clue...no clue that she had such a real reason to be terrified.
Writing about them is painful. None of them remain as they were. I have heard nothing from Aunt Elle in years, but I doubt she's gone.
I came from a small Indiana town. Nothing was secret, or so we were brought up to believe. Everyone knew everyone else's business. I was honors student material, and so were my siblings. My parents didn't brag about us to anyone outside of our family, but our family had no problem with bragging. We went to church every Sunday. We told stories around a bonfire, during summer camping trips. We were...well, we were happily uninterrupted.
Then, Dad discovered something odd. There was a religious group gathering regularly at a discreet location, which he refused to reveal to my mother (I learned of this from eavesdropping; my father would never have told me anything about this). He planned on asking about this group, since faith of any kind always intrigued him.
It was a cult. A freaking cult. He got sucked in, unwittingly, at first. Slowly, he began talking to the leader more and more often. Sooner rather than later, the leader had convinced my father to come to a...ceremony of sorts. My father witnessed the gruesome acts they committed, and, for some reason, didn't object to it. He came home with this terrifyingly...almost pleased look on his face. He looked crazed. My mother asked him if he was okay. No response. She felt his forehead: no temperature. She asked him what he saw. He shook his head, that wicked, mad grin still on his face, and said, "Exilis everto." My father, then, promptly passed out on the couch. Mother went after the group leader, the next day. My father had woken up without a single memory of the night before. She left me in the car as she stormed up to the man at his mailbox.
She said something like, "What the hell are you up to, Matthew?"
He replied with something like, "What do you mean, Jane?"
"You know very well what I mean." He stated at her, puzzled. She elaborated: "Sending my husband home in such a shape! You left him babbling nonsense, half-conscious on his feet!"
"Jane, I can explain every-"
"He had no trace of alcohol on his breath, he showed no sign of anything other than sleep and nutrient deprivation."
"Just let me explain," he lowered his voice. "I can invite you in for tea or something. I can tell you every detail." He glanced at me. I looked away, shy as I was, even in middle school. He continued, raising his voice to the volume at which he seemed to believe I could hear better, "Some of the church kids are over, too. I'm watching them for the day. I'm sure Tommy would have plenty of fun."
Wilcox was the cool adult, back then. Us kids loved him to no end.
Somehow, him being the leader of a secret inner circle of adults didn't surprise me. Anything he did was fine with me, back then. I didn't realize what this group had become...what they worshipped...what they did for it. I played the day away on various Xbox games with a couple of church kids who I wasn't all that familiar with (one boy was really nice, a year or two older than me, I thought; he apparently was actually looking after the kids, not Wilcox).
My mother, after two hours, came up the stairs to get me. She looked exhausted, but satisfied with the conversation she had had with Mr. Wilcox. She ushered me home.
I asked about the meeting, but she refused to tell me before discussing something with Dad. That night, they told me to go get something from the store down the street, and to take my sister with me. We found what we were looking for and, as we were returning home, we saw a strange man. A tall, willowy man. He wore a suit and the light from the street lamp he stood under seemed to drown out his pale complexion. He had no hair and, the more I looked, the more the light made him look like he had no face, either. He stared at us, so I hurried my sister along, back to the house. I told Mom. She told Dad. He told me to do my homework. Mom reached for the phone an our address book before my sister called me out of the room.
I kept thinking I saw it...that unmentionable creature. I imagined it everywhere. It wasn't terribly scary back then, just strange. I wanted to get a closer look, but I knew I shouldn't, for some reason.
I began seeing parents from our church community (aka, almost everyone in town) around the place. Instead of nodding and saying, "Hi," as they passed, they all seemed to smile warmly at me. It wasn't really weird or creepy until sister Laura, who rarely spoke to anyone ever, said to me, "Peace be with you," as I passed her while leaving Sunday school. I thought there was something I wasn't being told. Maybe Laura had just warmed up to me. Maybe there was something else...in any case, I had no idea what would happen in the next two days.
Church parents continued to smile, say sweet good-Christian things, and stare...and I grew suspicious. I asked my Father about it. His face went almost white out of shock. He told me nothing. "It's nothing."
Right. It wasn't nothing.
I was walking home from a friend's house when I saw...people. All in all, there were about five of them. They stood and watched outside of my house, in the dark, outside of the reach of street lights. I took the back door and told Dad. He told Mom. Mom told me to go to bed.
The next day, I did some Internet searching. I found plenty on cult activity in Indiana, but not much in my area. I abandoned the idea of finding out about the church-inner-circle thing, and eventually searched for something along the lines of what I had seen: the man in a suit. I got plenty about the Men In Black urban legend on the first couple of resources, but the third ha something...different. Nightmare fuel quality stuff. Guess which of the two I was dealing with? Yeah, the latter. I had no idea that that was the case, however.
Not until that thing lit a fire.
Not until it burned and charred our house, smoking us out.
It wanted me, for some reason. I was older than the usual kids it wanted: I was in 6th grade. I couldn't have known the grave danger I was in, or how under-protected I was. My Father, on his deathbed, burned and injured while trying to save my sister (and he did, thank whatever deity I should thank), told me the details. That, no, it wasn't as crazy as it sounded: he and Mom just simply didn't believe that that thing would take me to heaven. The nurse outside his hospital room told me that he just wanted me safe; that's what he was trying to get across. There was no creature. The pictures I'd seen on the Internet to support his claims were photo shopped. The Terrible Trivium existed not.
Until I saw him, again. My mother had taken my sister and I home (we were the three with the minor injuries: Dad was not likely to recover and my brothers were unconscious). I couldn't stop coughing, but that was normal. They didn't see the thing, but I did. That day, I went off in search of him in the woods. I found a cabin of sorts. It was like something out of the Navidson Record, though; the inside was huge while the outside looked barely large enough to fit a queen-sized bed into. The thing stood at the end of the first hallway. I stood, frozen in fear. A voice, suddenly, screamed in my ear, "Get out of here NOW, kid." There was no one in the entire room and hall other than the thing and me...and that voice had come from neither of us.
"Go!" I scrambled and burst back out of the door. I had initially thought that it was standing outside, waiting for me, reaching up into the tree branches...then I realized that it was a...a trash bag, holding a heavy load in it, hanging from a main branch of of the young oak. I ran home, half in tears.
Mom wasn't home. Elle was crying.
"Sis, what's wrong?"
"Mama left. She didn't say anything. She just got up and walked out and shut the door in my face and-" Her sobs cut her off. I hugged her, told her that Mama's just gone out, okay?
The voice came back, louder this time. I flinched as it said, "Get what you need and run. Go. Don't come back. Mother is gone. Father is gone. The boys are gone. Just GO." I sat for a moment, then I suppose I fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Dad was right. Those crazy people writing scary stories in the first person on the Internet were right. That thing was real.
In which case, that voice in my head was right. Running from such a full-on assault was the only solution for us kids, family or no.
So we packed two backpacks, grabbed some emergency cash, and ran.
I think that's enough reflecting for me today.
Hopefully that satisfies you (whoever reads this) as a proper introduction.
Maybe I'll be able to do more, later this week. I'm not sure.
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