On any given day, any month, any year in the 1980s, a box of cassette tapes with geographic coordinates pointing to a clearing in the middle of nowhere written on the lid was abandoned in front of a police station in Dakota. southern. No one saw the former owner of the box, or even got any clues about the sender, just the author of the tapes.
The tapes were numbered, and all had the same adult woman as author, identified only as Claire. Some of the tapes had only a few minutes of recording time, but none of the tapes had been recorded on the same day, so they could be listened to in order without prejudice to the interpretation of the content.
All seven tapes were transcribed, and several copies were spread among the agents.
At first, upon hearing the content of each of the tapes, the police judged it to be a prank call. However, as the contents of the tapes began to mention some isolated evidence of disappearances in the region, as well as certain local urban legends, the comical mentions of the tapes disappeared, giving way to a more serious analysis of each of the data.
Tape 1
Well, I've always liked forests, and... Oh, fuck, I'm not cut out for this shit anyway...
There's some shit outside my cabin, and that's it. I've never met him in person (thank God), but he's somewhere between a deer, a human, and a demon. I don't even know if I'll be alive until tomorrow, so if you find these tapes, get out of here ASAP. I'm not fucking kidding!
For the past two weeks I've seen this thing hanging around the cabin, trying to open doors, smashing my windows, rummaging through the trash, killing the raccoons that come by, and even show up with a guy's leg. I get scared to stay at home, and after this shit got here, things are getting weird as fuck.
[knocking on the door and the sound of something falling can be heard in the background of the recording]
I have to… I have to hide. We continue later…
Tape 2
Okay, let's try again… It's now, like, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and the thing only comes back at night. I have a beer here, and, my God, what a stress. let's start again
I came to this “tourist trap” in the middle of nowhere so I could rest my head and have a real vacation without anyone bothering me with work and more work. But, damn, that shit came on the first day. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of something big being crushed, then I peeked through the peephole and saw a shit with a man's body, a deer's head, a huge crow's beak and bat wings on its back trampling a dead moose. Soon after, this thing went to my door and started licking the peephole.
I took a step back, terrified, and in a split second I heard the sound of my car being destroyed. When I went back to the peephole, that thing was gone, and the dead moose had been torn apart on top of the hood of the car.
The next day, I pushed the moose out of my hood and tried to check the condition of the car, only to find I was stranded. The impact of the moose loosened something, and the engine was stalled on the ground. I also tried calling someone, but the phone cables had been stolen. In short, I had just discovered that I was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bizarre thing wandering outside my house.
Luckily, after about two or three days, I found out that that thing only appears at night, so I used the hatchet I found by the fireplace to chop wood and also get wood to make a barricade, and as that thing had the decency not to steal the fuses too, I had a fridge full of food.
And that's how I am so far, waking up in the middle of the night to see that thing scatter random animal corpses around the yard, watching him lick the door and make lewd poses and gestures and walk away.
But a couple of days ago something changed.
Instead of him just randomly killing animals, he started trying to get into the house. Yesterday he tried to enter the house through the basement, but luckily I had put the wood basket on top of the trapdoor, and the day before yesterday he tried to look for a hole in the ceiling. The windows are all broken already, but he couldn't get through them, so I think the barricades are working.
I just hope he doesn't try to do anything more violent.
Tape 3
Well, yesterday I had a tense night. Right after I finished recording the tape, that animal tried to enter through the chimney. Lucky for me, I had the fireplace on, so he ended up falling into the fire. Of course, there was no way he could climb up that fast, so I broke one of his paws with an ax as he climbed out of the way. The angle that bone was at was really weird, so I don't think he'll be able to run if I find him around.
It's almost morning now and he still hasn't shown up. Either I chased him away or I made him very angry. Anyway, I'm going to have to leave at some point or another, so I don't have much choice but to get the hell out of here.
Tape 4
This morning, after I had finished recording, I filled my backpack with dry food and water bottles, ate a lot of meat and rice, and started walking. I decided that I needed to get out of this forest as soon as possible, or die trying. Now it must be somewhere between 5 and 6 pm, and it's the first time I've stopped on the way. Not even a single car drove by, so I guess I'm really fucked up.
The sun is going down, and I'm out here with that thing hiding somewhere out there. At least I saw a cabin in the middle of the woods, it seems to be a hunter's cabin or something. If there's no one inside, I'll be forced to break down the door.
[falling sounds]
Shit! Fuck, what the fuck, my foot. Damn it.
[groans of pain]
Shit, first that shit wrecked my car, and now this! Holy shit!
[sounds of the recorder being picked up from the floor]
Okay, I fell. I didn't break anything, but now it's got a fucking cut. It hurts like hell, so I need a bandage. If that cabin isn't open, I'm so fucked up.
I need to sleep somewhere safe. It's not safe to spend the night out here. Not now…
Tape 5
Well, I can't say things are better or worse. I found a girl in the cabin who is going through the same situation as me, but unlike me, the thing appearing to her hasn't tried to enter the cabin yet. It's almost like some kind of ritual, this thing keeps us from running away, puts several random animal corpses in front of the house, and after a few days, tries to get into the house and make some kind of physical contact.
The girl's name is Ellen, and she was here with her boyfriend. They were on vacation and wanted to relax a little away from the madness of the city. Well, from the force that his boyfriend was hurled into the car, I have a slight feeling these things don't like competition very much...
I still prefer to think this thing wants to devour us. Being taken in some kind of bizarre mating ritual is strange, to say the least.
She helped me bandage my foot and put on some iodine. I'm praying it works, because if it gets infected, I'm fucked.
Tape 6
The thing that was following the other girl caught her. Somehow, she had the key to the front door, so putting furniture in the windows was pointless. She was punched in the chin and carried over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
You, who are listening to this, must be thinking: “how could she not be taken along?”
Simple: he didn't want me. He looked at me, motioned for silence with his fingers, and closed the door again without making a sound.
I tried to follow that thing through the woods, and I don't think it saw me, but after a few meters it ran into a few more of them, maybe three or four, so I figured I'd better hide and head back to the cabin as soon as they got distracted. .
I have to get out of here ASAP, now those things know how far I am.
Tape 7
I'm [gasp] walking [gasp] again... What's new...
[sound of heavy object falling]
I think I need to get some rest...
[heavy breathing for 40 seconds]
Okay, basically I tried to head towards the road again but I saw a lot of those things walking on the side of the road as I was leaving the house, so there's not much left for me but going into the woods. Luckily I searched the house this morning before I left and found some hunter stuff, like a small machete, a pair of boots, a whistle, some packets of dried food and a map. Of course, I didn't get the gun, which was exactly what I'd need, but I managed to make a makeshift spear out of duct tape, a broom handle, and a vegetable knife. Anything that helps is better than nothing.
So I'm going to walk in the northwest direction of the forest, because the map shows that there's a city in that direction, and it's faster to cut through there. From what it says on the map, it's about seven kilometers, so it's possible to get there in a few hours. Still, I'm hoping I can get there before four o'clock, because otherwise I'm completely screwed, because I only got a bottle of water to begin with, and secondly, I can't see in the dark.
In any case, wish me luck.
[cut sound in recording]
[the following excerpts have a crying tone in their voice]
Okay, it's been a few hours and I'm completely fucked up, because the fucking city doesn't exist. I ended up in the nest of these things, and I can hear them coming back, so I know I'm fucked. There are about twenty women tied up here, many are pregnant, but none of them seem to be conscious, and several human bones scattered on the floor. I don't know if this recording will ever reach anyone or if these things will destroy everything, but if it does, tell my mom I'm sorry.
Ellen is here too, I tried to wake her up, but she seems to have been injured.
My name is Barbara Simpson, I live at 314 E on 45th St in Minneapolis, and if you're hearing this, I'm already dead. I went on a trip last week, and now I'm somewhere unknown about to be killed by a bunch of weird monsters. I'll try to at least take some of them with me, if that's what has to happen.
I didn't want things to turn out this way...
Please let my parents, Sarah and Peter know, that I love them.
Three vehicles were sent to the location indicated by the coordinates. On the way, they found a cabin with a crushed car, a partially charred cabin with the bones of some unidentified beings and several graffiti on signs with messages indicating that the way ahead was dangerous. Upon arriving at the location indicated by the coordinates, the police found the naked and partially decomposed corpses of at least eight adult women, as well as the bones of a hundred women. The only similarities between all of them were the huge cleft in the region of the abdomen and grotesque signs of physical aggression, such as broken bones and disfigured faces.
The Army was notified and surrounded the place, saying they were victims of an alleged serial killer. Officers were “advised” to withhold certain evidence, such as the transcript of the tapes and the partially charred bones inside the burned-out mountain cabin, as well as any other evidence that did not support the serial killer hypothesis. The road was closed, and part of the mountain was considered risky territory, with warnings indicating the risk of landslides and attacks by bears and wolves. A hut was built by one of the platoons, and inside it were placed eight heavily armed elite soldiers, as well as an unknown number of (alleged) criminal investigators.
The rest of the data has been purged.
One of the officers was found dead under suspicious circumstances two days later after handing me the case file, the box of original cassette tapes, and photocopies of various confidentiality documents signed by several officers, all of them bearing an NSA and Interpol seal.
No data other than these was made public after the area was quarantined, which had its native forest cut down and at least 9 (nine) caves dynamited.
After the reforestation, there were no more reports of disappearance from the site, and the hut built by the Army was burned and the soil inside and around it sterilized with lime and rock salt.
It is estimated that 80 (eighty) women of childbearing age lost their lives between the 1900s and 1980s in the region, and at least 250 (two hundred and fifty) are still missing. The identity of the victims remains unknown.
Barbara Simpson's remains were never found.
