Probably Entry #36?

Sorry, no pictures today. Nothing that cool, unless you want to see fisheye pictures of my room.

At this point I feel paranoid and not just a bit crazy. When I walk out of my room, I always think I see a shadow running down the stairs. There's never anything, though, no sound or anything. If I look outside, I swear something walks under the porch, but there are never footprints in the snow. I woke up last night and swore I felt mud on my feet, but there was nothing.

Haha, I must be getting used to these impossible things. An eight-armed creature giving me codes to save my brother, who am I kidding? He's gone. We've searched and there's no signs of him. All we have is his torn up shirt--which I'll take a picture of tomorrow or the next day--and what are we going to find? Fingerprints? Nope. Claw marks is more like it. Same thing that got the policeman, probably. He's probably lying under the snow somewhere, stomach opened.

To top it all off, I've had a cold for the past week and a half. Dry skin and nosebleeds too. Being out in the cold and the snow searching hasn't been good for me.

But I can't stop now. I'm going to bide my time and wait for more clues. I'm finding 'the Howler', I'm finding 'Locust', even though I know James is gone.

R.C.

New Camera

Well, I tested out the new camera today. Quite high quality. Here's some of the pictures.

The kitten.

 From directly under James's window. Front yard.

 Same as above, just to the left. There are footprints. Nobody had been out there since it snowed. Well, now we stamped down a lot of snow with our resumed search, but nobody had been out before I took the picture. But I heard nothing, felt nothing, so I'm assuming it's nothing important.

 To the side of the house.

 Ditto.

 Miniature effect came on the camera.Testing it out.

 More kitten.

All in all, I think the camera is pretty good. Heh, maybe that's why the things are staying away. They don't like pictures. I'm glad it has a long-lasting battery, because I'm keeping it near me all the time. I'm still having nightmares about the policeman. Really bad nightmares. But all I have to do now is search for James and be constantly vigilant.

Last thing. This camera has video recording. Should I make a Youtube? In case something happens I can't explain, I feel like it might best to put it somewhere so you can explain it. I'll stick to the blog and Twitter (which has proved far more useful than what I ever thought) if you think it's a bad idea.

Well.

I suppose I should tell you about the last few days. After the policeman's murder.

We immediately called the police--ironic, I know, but what else could be done? I have no idea what happened to the body. They had it covered up when they escorted us away.

We were all questioned about it. I had to repeat everything I saw so many times, not to mention the fact it replayed in my head no matter how much I tried to distract myself. The blood.

They let us go the next day. At least they tried to make it comfortable in there over the night, giving us pillows and blankets and stuff. It was freezing, though.

They still won't help with James. The chief freely admitted he could not be found. Straight to our faces, he said they couldn't find him. I tried to ask what they knew about Locust and the Howler, but we were escorted out before I could say anything.

My parents won't talk to me. They're still in shock from...everything, I guess.  I am too, I suppose.

We got a new camera for 'Christmas'. We didn't even have our tree, and the lack of a tree made everything even more somber. I didn't think it could get more depressing. Heh.

This camera can take video now. Hi-def video, too. I'm keeping it next to me no matter where I am. If the Howler comes near me again, I'll try to get a picture before I smash its head in. Maybe I'll get a picture afterward, too.

I don't even think I could get a picture of whatever knocked me out the other day. I barely looked at it, and I was gone. That was Locust, I am almost sure, the man--the thing that took James.

God damn it. If I can't even get near it, how am I supposed to get James back?

It's snowing. It's supposed to be over a foot. We're trapped in the house. I have my camera, I have my book, and I have a flashlight if the power goes out. I don't think I'm going to sleep tonight with the wind on the shutters and the constant movement of the snow outside.

This may be some sick wish, but I hope that James is safe in a building somewhere, not out in the snow. Please, let him be alright.

R.C.

I'm throwing up again just from thinking about this post. My God, it was horrible. I shouldn't be writing about this, but I feel as if I have to, even if it's just as a warning.

Our policeman is dead. This morning, I looked out the window and saw red. Blood was all over the driveway.

One tree overhangs our driveway. The policeman was hanging from it. His stomach was ripped open. Some part of him, something was draped over the tree. It ripped as I watched. He flailed to the ground.

He was still alive as this happen. I could hear him gurgle through the window. He looked at his stomach. He tried to push what was left back in. hhhhhh. GOD.

I couldn't do anything, again. Guh. I won't forget it, ever. I close my eyes and I just see him falling from the tree, over and over.

I keep throwing up. I can't help it. Every time I picture it I gag.

Now we have the police back. More interviews.

The Cloth, V2.

We got the window fixed today. Guy barely looked at us, fixed the window as fast as he could, and left.

I know I should be thinking about my brother, but all I could think of was how lucky we were that none of the cats escaped through the window.

Anyway. Around 3 P.M. today, I walked into my room, and bam, right in the center, is the cloth. The same piece of cloth. I could see little fading stitches where it had said "Gut Loop". Now it said, in much tinier, cursive letters, "Your backyard."

I tried to pick it up. It burnt my fingers. I brought my dad upstairs. He couldn't see words on the cloth at all. I'm crazy. I was scared to look in the backyard even when it was light out, but I knew I had to before it got dark.

So I went out back. Told my parents, but I don't know if they were listening. I'm safe now, so everything was fine.

I headed toward our pond, which is off to the right behind the house. Before I could even reach it, I saw another piece of cloth hanging off a dead tree next to the pond.

It was my brother's shirt. It was completely ripped down the middle, and badly torn in other spots.

I turned to run back to the house and I saw it. Locust, not even the Howler this time. Just a suit. And white, pure bright white.

That's all I remember. I woke up in the house on the couch. My parents said I had been sleeping there since we got home. It wasn't a dream though. I still had James's shirt. I showed it to my parents and they said it was his, but they refused to believe it was outside, or that I had seen Locust. I don't believe I saw it either, because it doesn't exist. It's my brother's abductor, and he's back. I just imagined the blank, the white. I was lucky I wasn't taken by him. Why he didn't take me, I don't know. Maybe he's playing with me, just like he played with James. Just like the thing--the Howler--is playing with me too.

We have one policeman assigned to us again for this week. Let's hope he helps. I doubt he will.

It's Gone.

We left the house today to go food shopping.

When we got back, our porch window was smashed in. Our TV, our computer, and all of our house phones were wrecked. Two things were stolen. Nothing else.

My camera and my brother's flute case were gone. So was every clue the Howler had given me.

All that was left was a word on my wall.

TeeHee.

We're in a hotel for the next two nights, because nobody will fix the window until Monday. I'm on my dad's laptop right now. The police barely looked at the house before saying it was a random robbery. Bullshit. This was the Howler, messing with me.

I'll try to keep you updated, but I don't know how much I can use my dad's computer.

R.C.

An Attempt to Bring a Semblance of Happiness. :)

Absolutely nothing happened today. Nothing at all.

So I read my old posts from the start. I can't believe it's only been less than a month--it feels so long. But as I read the posts, I realized how much this has killed me inside. It's numbed my emotions, made me always depressed. I mean, you would be depressed if your brother was gone too, right? I'd hope you would.

But at this point I've reached the stage of acceptance, I think. Even with all this crazy stuff going on, Locust, the stalker, the Howler, I can't help him by constantly searching. Whatever game this Howler is playing with me, I can't actively pursue it because I have no idea where he/it is. I have to wait.

So, realizing that, I give you this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFJfzmbt35M . Best Japanese Ad ever. First thing that actually made me laugh since James left.

R.C.

More Taunting.

It was in my room. It was inside the house. Nobody noticed. No signs of break-in. No footprints--sorry, handprints--in the snow.

I walked into my room an hour ago. This was on the wall, pinned up.

It had taken down one of my posters. Ripped it up, in fact. Put this up instead.

It's another code. It's playing games with me.

And there are arrows pointing to the ripped out piece. It's taunting me.


The Howler is just having fun.

The Howler

Well, now I know what Ken was talking about. Heh.

I biked to Ken's house this morning. It snowed today, but the roads were only wet.

I got to his front door at about 1 P.M. He doesn't work, according to Mom, so I knew he would be home. He opened the door before I knocked. He must have been looking out the window, because I definitely wasn't making any sound.

He invited me in. Let me tell you, his house smelled pretty amazing. Some sort of combination of incense and spice.

Of course, the first thing I saw when I step in is a statue of Shiva. I stopped, literally dead still. Ken laughed. He said, "Don't worry about Shiva yet."

...Yeah. A bit ominous.

I had gone to his house to ask him questions, so I started asking him. I'll just run through the questions here. No commentary, just questions and answers. I wrote everything down, word for word, in my notebook. I'm just typing it out here.


Me: What do you know about my brother?
Ken: Nothing, other than that he is gone. My condolences. I'll participate in the search later.
M: What does Shiva have to do with this?
K: Think about it.
M: Tell me.
K: I cannot.
M: My God. My brother is gone and you can't tell me. Fine. What's Rudra?
K: Ah, Rudra. You may have heard him the other day. He's quite associated with Shiva. He's...how do I say it...Shiva's pet. He likes to pick up the pieces of what Shiva has left behind.
M: So you're saying Shiva took my brother.
K: Yes.
M: You're telling me a god took my brother.
K: Yes.
M: Hahaha. Right. Well. What can you tell me about something called Locust? (At this point I showed him one of the pictures of Locust James drew.)
K: That is Shiva, yes.
M: What about Slender Man? Ever heard of that?
K: Don't call him that.
M: Ah, so Slender Man is Shiva?
K: (Shouting) Don't call him that.

So now I've got an Indian god related to a fake supernatural creature, and another enslaved Indian god following that. Heh. And absolutely nothing to help me find my brother. What a complete joke.

And then this happened. I left Ken's house. He was pretty angry at me. I biked home, and was walking my bike up the driveway. I heard the same howl I had heard at the trail.

Then this thing jumped out at me. This sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.

This thing had no legs. Just arms. I don't know how many arms. I have no idea how it moved, nor do I know how it was able to move so fast. It knocked me and my bike over. It hit me in the face. Then it ran away.


This thing was absolutely hideous. It couldn't have been a person, it couldn't have been a bear, it couldn't have been real. From what I saw, it had three eyes. Three. Eyes. No mouth, nothing that I could see before it ran.


I chased after it. Left my bike on the driveway and ran into my backyard. Ran through the snow with sneakers. I followed it to the end of our property. It just galloped, like a, I don't know, like a horse, on all of its arms. At the stone wall at the end of the property it just...disappeared. I couldn't hear it or see it anymore, and it had been directly in front of me.

Then I saw words scratched into the tree that breaks up the wall. Somehow, in the time before it managed to disappear, it managed to write something. I didn't have my camera, and by the time I could have gone back it would have been dark. I don't want to go outside in the dark. I had my notebook though, and I wrote it down.

TEEHEE

SV'H HGROO ZOREV. OVG'H SZEV HLNV UFM.

A-Z B-Y


I have no idea what it says. But it's there to taunt me.


I have three claw marks down my face now. I had to lie to my parents and say the cat got me. Would they believe me anyway? This is a stress-related hallucination. But the box is real. And the words are real. I'm going insane.

R.C.

Gut Loop

It didn't stop raining today, but it lessened a lot, so I went out to the mountain bike trails I had biked on with my brother. This is where we saw Locust, or ///it/// or Slender Man, whatever Razputine said it was. I walked along the Gut Loop trail. I couldn't remember exactly where I had seen the man in the suit, but I knew it was after the rock face with the jumps.

It was completely muddy and dirty and cold outside. Practically everywhere I stepped was a puddle. I'm already catching a cold from just being outside in that horrendous weather.

Anyway. I was walking down the rock face. Perched at the bottom was this tiny box. It couldn't have been there long, because there were bike tracks going directly under it.

Man, do I wish I had a picture. Directly in front of the box someone--or something--had scratched "YOU'LL NEVER FIND HIM".

Well, if I wasn't already scared of being murdered, I sure was now. Heh. The box had "James" in green marker on the top. It's a fairly small box, much smaller than a shoebox. It's made of wood. I've never seen it before.

I was about to (stupidly) open it right there, in the drizzle. I would have gotten everything wet. But I heard a howl, a really really loud howl really close. It wasn't a coyote or a wolf or an owl, or anything I had ever heard. I booked it back home. Ran all the way.

When I got home I couldn't find my parents. I freaked out some more. Then I found they were sleeping, probably for the first time in a long time. I decided to open the box alone. They probably wouldn't consider it important anyway.

I undid the clasps on the case and realized what it was--James's flute case. He had taken his flute out, put it somewhere else (I honestly don't know where, I'm not going to go into James's room until we find him), and stuffed papers and photos inside.

More stuff about Locust. Four pages of just the word "lOcust", with the O bigger than any of the other letters. One of the pages has "It watches". Another says "TELL THEM" with the word "never" inside.

But the worst part was that he had stuff on Shiva. He had a printout from Wikipedia about Shiva. Circled the words "eight arms", and that Shiva was associated with Rudra. This means that Ken knows about this. He knew about Shiva and Rudra.

Oh no. The Howler--Rudra. That's what I heard on the trail. Is this happening to me to? No.

James had one photograph in the box--flute case too. It was a picture my dad had taken of him out in front of our house a month ago. James circled something off to the right. It's a head. A blank, empty white face. Wearing a black bowler hat. Oh God.

I'm Getting Somewhere.

I was asleep last night, finally. The cloth woke me up.

I tried recording it, but it must sense what's happening around it. I can't believe I'm saying this about paranormal crap, but I can't believe my brother is gone either.

Anyway, the murmuring from it got really loud, and it must have made me wake up. Out of nowhere, I hear James. He shouts, "Save me from Locust". Then everything falls silent.

After he shouted I felt something wet on my lip. I turned on the light. My nose had started bleeding. I was crying too. I didn't even notice.

This morning the cloth had a name on it. "Gut Loop" it said. That was the first place I saw the man, the Locust, at the mountain biking trail. I didn't even realize it. I'm going back there as soon as it stops raining and this fog disappears.

It won't stop raining until tomorrow according to the weather reports. My parents suspended searches. Any other clues are getting washed away.

R.C.

The Cloth.

We got the piece of cloth back.

It's the only tangible clue we have to get him back. That and the notebook.

My mother doesn't even want to look at it. She's exhausted. My dad thinks it's worthless. He's out searching. He increased the search area. He's not going to find anything.

So I'm the only one who has the cloth. It's only a foot square, and a half-inch thick. It doesn't have any stitches. Nothing. No seams, no markings. I tried ripping it, cutting it. Didn't work. It's incredibly strong.

And it whispers. I'm not going crazy, because my cats can hear it too. They go crazy if it starts talking. If it's out of my line of sight, it starts talking. I can't understand it. It's just unintelligible whispers, but they sound desperate and lonely. If only I could just understand it--or them, I don't know--I think it knows about my brother.

R.C.

A Conversation.

I barely slept last night. Probably due to the police search lights shining into my windows while they were packing up.

The police are walking out of this case. I heard them say they wouldn't help us anymore. They won't help us search, they won't put out a public announcement. All they would do was file the missing person report. My God, I hate them.

I went back into James's room this morning. His teddy bear was lying on the ground. He's had it since he was 3.

Yesterday, my parents, a few of our neighbors, and I circled the property looking for him. Nothing. Not a single clue. I was paired up with a guy who lives a few doors down. His name is Ken. He's big into Indian culture. He's Hindu and all of that stuff. Visited India a few times.

In the middle of our search, in the swampy part of our property, he turned to me. He smiled, and said "Beware of Shiva and Rudra, my boy. Shiva can be capricious, and you never quite know what Rudra will do."

I know who Shiva is, but what the hell does a Hindu god have to do with me or my brother? I tried to ask him what he meant, but he wouldn't answer me any more. I tried to look up Rudra, but I keep getting error messages from Google.

R.C.

Police.

Counselor told me it was okay to write about this.

Last night we went to the police station to file the missing person report. I think I posted on the Twitter about it.

They also questioned us. I don't think they think we're suspects though.

They took my parents into another room and left me outside. I could still hear them for the most part though. As I said, the police are incompetent. They'll never be able to help us. Not that they would, anyway. They wouldn't let me take a picture of the cloth, the only foreign object in James's room, before they took it away.

But I could hear them tell my parents that they knew my brother was gone. They had seen the type of cloth left behind in James's room before. Anybody who had that cloth in their room had yet to be found. And there was always something, a name, written on the wall of the abductee's room, below an empty circle. If the abductees had paper, they would draw the same thing.

The abductees always knew they were being stalked, yet they didn't tell anybody. Just like James.

I refuse to believe James won't be found. The police are refusing to help with searching. My parents are organizing volunteer search parties.

Twitter.

The police told me to make a Twitter, of all things. I laughed at them. I didn't think they were serious.


Well, they were. So instead of searching for my brother, I'm sitting at a computer. This is worthless. They won't let me search for him. We're under constant police protection now. They think I'm going to be taken too.

Please, anybody who knows anything about this 'Locust', this man, please tell me.

http://twitter.com/#!/HelpFindJames

Help Us

The police searched my brother’s room. They found some truly disturbing things.

My brother knew he was being followed .

The police found the notebook I gave him for his seventh birthday. He wrote in it. A lot.

That's the notebook.

The police looked through it. He drew our house.

I never knew how good he was at sketching. 

That's the view from his window onto the front lawn. What is this?

           The police found this under a poster he had hanging. They said they had found this circle plus a name of some type near others who had disappeared.
           There are more pages in the notebook. I can't post them now, posting these caused me enough pain. I will find this man, this Locust.
           We need you back James.

...

We searched all day. I can’t find him.

Police called a counselor in for my family. She told me to keep writing for two reasons. She said it was therapeutic and that some clue, anything in what I write could help us find him.

She said to write exactly what happened today. She said to write exactly what I told her. So I’ll write it.

I was walking up to my room after breakfast this morning. My room is just after his room. I saw his door was open a little bit.

I saw the man with the suit in James’s room. 

His back was toward me. I tried to rush into the room. I tried.

There was nothing in his room when I burst in. No man. No James. I must have screamed, or yelled, or something, because my mom was next to me a few seconds later.

The police showed up half an hour later. I just sat on the couch. I could have been looking for James, but I didn’t do anything. Anything.

They formed a search team. They looked in the woods for hours. I tried to help but they wouldn't let me.

The police secured his room and had some guy come in and take pictures. They said they couldn’t file a missing persons report until he had been gone 48 hours, but they investigated anyway. All they found in his room were the pair of binoculars and a piece of cloth.

The piece of cloth wasn’t there before. James didn’t have anything resembling it either. The police said they are considering it a lead.

One of the policemen said they had seen this before. A kid gone missing with a piece of cloth left behind.

I’m going to find this man in the suit.

I’m going to kill him.

I'm going to get my brother back.

y

James is gone. We're searching. Police are helping.

I'm panicked, parents too. This might help me calm down.

God, please help us find my brother.

Entry #11, Aphex Twin

It hasn’t been a week since my last music review, but I think I’ll do them every Sunday from now on. This review is of Aphex Twin. I HOPE somebody reading this knows about ol’ Aphex Twin, because he’s one of the pioneers of Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM. He primarily use in-your-face, glitchy drums over ambient, floating synth or piano lines for his sound.

This is the guy who inspired me to get into music production. I wanted to learn how to make sounds like he does. There are many producers these days who emulate his sound and push IDM even further, including Venetian Snares and μ-Ziq (pronounced Music).

His sound is strangely pleasing even though he uses sharp, attacking drumbeats. This is because of his melodic tracks, which intertwine beautifully with the drum tracks. Some call him a genius because his most famous album, “Richard D. James”, (which is his real name) takes a theme and each song is a variation on that theme.

Personally, I don’t see how each song is a variation on a theme, nor do I care. I just care about the quality of the music, and the quality of the music is AMAZING. Aphex Twin pays so much attention to each and every drum hit; I can barely hear a measure where the drums are exactly the same. However, he does manage to keep the drums recognizable, which is an even greater feat when he glitches them.

He also has quite the sense of humor. When one of his videos was pushed into a late time slot on MTV for being ‘inappropriate for children’, he got frustrated. The video was “Come to Daddy” (look it up, it’s quite creepy). He argued that MTV showed tons of rap with curse words galore and didn’t deem them inappropriate for children. Because of his frustration, he ended up making another video with a 3 minute intro with fake rappers driving around and cursing practically every other word.

Sadly, that video got a lot of play time on MTV. I don’t know if the MTV producers knew Aphex Twin was satirizing them. XD

Aphex Twin doesn’t have an official Youtube channel, unfortunately. However, you can just search him on Youtube and a ton of his songs will pop up.

Enjoy. :)

R.C.

Entry #10

I’m sitting at home when I could be at the tennis tournament. :(

I should probably stop complaining. I sound like a whiner. But, now I’ll rant for a post. :P

You know what’s really annoying to me? Text speak. wen people dont capitalize an dont speel things curectly or use punctuation and have run-on sentences like this one is y’know what i meen?

Or even when people talkkkk likeee thisss. Does anybody else find it annoying? I try to spell everything out in my texts, and I try to use as much punctuation that can fit. Admittedly I don’t put the apostrophe in my contractions, but there are only so many characters that can fit into a text.

And, of course, it’s rude to tell people to stop typing that way, but after texting somebody who talks like that for a long time, it gives me a headache. >.<

I suppose a lot of other things annoy me, but that’s one thing that I had to get off my chest.

Oh, funny story. Remember how the TV decided to die a few days ago, on Tuesday night? I sat down Wednesday morning to watch an old episode of Lost on the computer, and as I was about to start, the TV popped back on. Guess what was on? Lost.

It freaked me out for a minute, but it was just a coincidence. I would have mentioned this sooner, but I forgot.

Last thing for now: my brother went to my parents and asked them for the gun for Christmas. They told him no (very nicely, I might add) and now he’s really upset. He’s been up in his room all day since they told him. That’s why I didn’t want to be around when they told him. :/

R.C.

Entry #9

I’m already getting antsy from the taper. >.< It’s no fun, and I want to play tennis really badly. I had to cancel the tournament for this weekend, I hadn’t realized taper started. The tournament would have started tomorrow. I think my mom is taking the swimming more seriously than I am. XD

More talk about swimming. If this bores whoever reads it…too bad. :P My swim team has two different types of swim meets. There are the local league’s meets, and then there are the USA Swimming swim meets.

The local league meets don’t really count toward anything; those are the meets that we just try to win instead of have every person focus on getting best times. The USA meets are the ones that really matter. The times you swim in USA meets are the times colleges look at, along with high-school times.

This may not be the correct thing to say, but…I don’t try too hard in the local meets. I just try to get as high a place in my races I can. If that warrants trying to get a best time, so be it. If it just means I have to swim faster than the guy next to me, that’s fine too. I focus on the USA meets more, and I suppose the coach does too, seeing as he’s having us taper for a USA meet and not a local meet.

My little brother swims too, but he doesn’t really care about swimming. He’s only eight, though. I didn’t really care about swimming when I was eight either.

Da-de-dum, let’s see what else. Oh, I’m pretty sure the guy who I've seen wandering around town in  the suit is actually one of the parents of somebody on the swim team. I saw him standing outside the pool building yesterday. He looked like he was waiting for his kid to get changed and leave. He looked pretty bored, at least from his body language. I would be too if I was just waiting outside the pool in the cold. XD

R.C.