The Case of Stitch (Part 5)

I just woke up and thought I should write this down before I forget. I haven’t been sleeping that much lately, which is why I am just now waking up. The paranoia and fear is just getting worse as the case goes on. I had this really weird dream. I was in a field. Just a field like you would normally think of when you think about fields. Trees everywhere with shrubs at their bases. There were some deer off in the distance and I could hear birds chirping. The sun was shining. As I stood there thinking about how this would be a good place to come and think. I started thinking about my childhood. I used to come to a field just like this and play with my dogs. They loved to play fetch in the grass. When it was really tall they loved to sneak up on me or leap over the grass like gazelles.

I thought it was a dream about that. But as soon as the sun vanished and the clouds covered the air, I knew this was no dream – but a nightmare – and not one that was about my dog filled childhood.

When the clouds covered the sky, the plants all died. The trees lost their leaves, the grass turned brown, the flowers wilted where they stood. The deer dropped dead and the birds fell from the sky. There was a smell in the air that I can’t even begin to describe; it was so disgusting. Beyond disgusting. Like rotten flesh and rotten eggs and rotten milk all combined together. I watched as all the deer dropped to the ground and I ran to them thinking there could be a way for me to help. But when I got there, there was nothing I could do. Their flesh was already rotting and parasites had already come to eat the meat off their bones.

Suddenly, I heard a loud, low groaning sound. It was coming from all around me. It sounded like it was coming from the trees. I couldn’t escape it by running. It just got louder and louder the longer I was in that field. I saw some concrete stairs going into the ground. I watched myself run. It kept switching from first person view to third person. It was really disorienting. I kept going towards the stairs and then hurried down them. At the bottom of the stairs there was a beat up wooden door. Something told me I shouldn’t open the door, no matter how badly I wanted to escape that groaning sound. That I should force myself to wake up and just keep going on with my life, without opening that door. But of course, like in all nightmares and typical Hollywood teen screams, your gut is ignored.

I opened the door. It creaked and it felt like it was going to fall off its hinges. There were scratches all over the back side of the door. Like someone had been trying to escape. It was cold as I entered the hallway the door lead to. Ice cold. I shivered. I didn’t know if I was shivering from fear or from the cold. Either one was entirely plausible. I closed the door behind me and the groaning stopped instantly.

It was pitch black dark, but I walked down the hall anyways. I tried to move quickly, but my feet felt like they were made of lead. It felt like each step took five minutes. It was driving me crazy. I put my hands on the walls to guide me. I felt inscriptions on the wall, but I couldn’t tell what they said. I patted my pockets to see if my cell phone was there. It was, so I pulled it out of my pocket and when I went to open it to shine light on the wall, it shocked me and I dropped it. I winced and shook my hand to get the pain to stop. I went to pick it up off the ground, but it turned to dust as my hand touched it.

The dust was unusually warm and more ashy than grainy. I stumbled forward, keeping my hands on the walls to guide me. I felt more inscriptions, but I wouldn’t find out till later what they were. I felt a corner and slid my hands onto the cold wall in front of me. As I felt it, trying to find an escape, I felt a handle. I put my hand on it, tried to push or pull the door open. It wouldn’t budge. So I tried sliding it open. And that worked. It slid open with a loud bang.

I walked into the room and slid the door closed behind me. The lighting was like a doctor’s office. The kind of light that washes out your skin and makes it look blue. I always hated that light. The room looked like the morgue in the hospitals. In the middle of the room there was a metal table, shiny and eerily clean. Like it had never been used. Along the walls there were drawers you put dead bodies in. The room smelled strongly of sulfur. Next to the table there was a little cart with various surgery tools on it. I walked towards it carefully. Every step I took was deafening. I got to the table and picked up the first tool I saw, a Stryker saw. My dad was a coroner so he would always talk about that stuff over dinner, which I really didn’t appreciate. The only time I put up with it was when I was doing an internship for him when I was trying to decide what part of the police world I wanted to join.

I started thinking about how I had to watch him use various saws to cut ribs open to get to the heart. I remembered the blood everywhere and dropped the saw on the ground, forgetting I was holding it. It hit the leg of the cart and all the tools fell onto the ground. The metal clanked against the tiles on the ground. The sound was just as deafening as my footsteps had been. When the sound stopped, I started to look around the rest of the room. It was back in third person. I watched myself wander around the room. My other self looked into the file drawers that weren’t full of bodies. He pulled out some papers and looked at them. All the files were in a different language, but neither me nor the other me could tell which language it was. I watched myself find a single paper in English, talking about the Lake Bodom murders. I remember Googling the case a couple years ago out of curiosity because one of my favorite bands was named after them. No one ever found out who committed them. Maybe Stitch was behind those attacks too... Then suddenly I was back in first person.

As soon as I oriented myself, I started hearing banging and moaning. I looked around the room and saw the body drawers shaking. I heard people pleading to be let out, moaning and groaning, begging. I started panicking and ran to the corner. I sat on the ground and covered my ears and closed my eyes, hoping against all hope that the sound would stop. And it did. It wasn’t a good quiet though. It was a scary quiet. Eerie. The quiet went on for what felt like forever until the loud groaning sound from the field started again. I walked to the sliding door trying to find a way to escape it again. I opened the door but couldn’t see anything. My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness in the hall. Once they did, I saw Stitch standing at the end of the hallway. You could only see one of his arms. He took a step forward and then I could see him holding his chains behind his back.

“Are you trying to hide?” Stitch said.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“We are inside your memories,” he replied.

“Why?” I asked.

'“I want to ruin your best memories. I feed off fear and anger. I killed the animals and turned the sky gray. Now look behind you and feel more fear,”' Stitch said.

All of a sudden there was the stench of rotten flesh and blood in the air. I turned around slowly. As I turned around I slipped and hit my head on one of the counters. I put my hand on my head to ease the pain and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I looked at my hands and they were covered in blood. I looked around the rest of the room and the floor was flooded with blood. Papers covered the floor. I looked at the body drawers and saw all of them were open. The dead bodies inside them were sitting up on their metal beds, smiling, with dead eyes and pale skin. One had a gunshot wound on his head with crusted blood around the edges. Another had his throat slit. Another was severely burned; his skin was blackened. Their smiles were still and frozen. Like mannequins. I turned back to look at Stitch again. His arm was still bent back.

'“Meet my latest victim. Courtesy of you.” '

He grabbed his chains with both of his hands. He jerked someone roughly. As the mystery person went flying through the air, Stitch jerks him back by the neck even more roughly than before. It yelped and cried in pain. He landed right in front of Stitch. There was a chain around his neck. It could’ve come off, but there were spikes driven into his neck, keeping them in place. The holes in his neck kept oozing blood. His legs were broken off at the knee. His femur was sticking out. The skin and muscle were all torn, still bleeding. From his bottom lip to half way down his neck, the skin was gone. The muscle was disturbingly red, bloody… it made me want to puke. It seemed like every pore in his body was blood oozing out of it. He was so beat up. Some of his teeth were missing. His hair was torn out in chunks. His arms and chest had gruesome scratches all over them. His eye lids were missing. His eyes were dried and shriveled. There were chunks of his face missing, along with the rest of his body.

“You know who I am,” Stitch’s victim said.

“No I don’t,” I said quietly, scared.

''“Yes you do. You watched me get taken away.”''

“RepetitiveRoutine,” he said.

Then it hit me. I recognized his short dark brown hair with its slight curl. I felt a fit of tears coming and held them back. Suddenly, RepetitiveRoutine came loose and started bounding towards me. He ran on his fists, like an ape. While he ran, he screamed blood curdling screams. Terrified, I stumbled back and ran as fast as I could to the corner of the morgue-like room. I slammed the door and as soon as the sound rang through my ears I woke up. Or at least I thought I did.

''“You need to wake up, Ryan. It’s time to have breakfast,”'' a voice said.

I found myself in my childhood bedroom, cuddled up in my Scooby Doo sheets. I rolled over and saw my mom watching me. Before I could answer her, Stitch came up behind her. He loomed over her. He was wearing a blue button up shirt with slacks. He put his hand on her shoulder. She put hers over his. “Hey, honey. I’m just trying to wake up Ryan,” she said.

“Wake up, son,” Stitch said.

Stitch was playing the part of my dad. But my mom couldn’t even tell that my dad wasn’t there. She couldn’t tell what was coming for her. Naked again, Stitch tore her skin off in one piece and danced with it, laughing. I was left frozen in terror. And even with her skin missing, my mom stood there smiling. After a little bit of dancing, he tore her skin in half. The back of her landed on the floor and he held up the front in front of him. He put his eyes where hers should be, wore her like a mask.

“Good morning, baby,” he said, mocking my mother’s voice.

He stuck his tongue through her lips and wiggled it around at me like a child, and started laughing again, even louder. All the while, my mother was standing there, all meat, just looking at me. Stitch dropped the rest of her skin on the ground and grabbed her veins from her ankles and wrists. He wrapped them together and swung her around, her feet touching her hands. As he swung her around, her blood splattered all over the room. It flew onto my face and I nearly threw up. I tried to get up off my bed and run away, but before I could reach the door, Stitch pushed me against the window. A piece of broken glass cut my back, leaving a huge scratch. I woke up for real then, drenched in sweat.

I went to the bathroom before I started writing this. There’s a scratch on my back… I’m going to go to the hospital now and get this checked out. I just thought of this… My dad’s still alive. Why was Stitch pretending to be him in my dream if he’s still here? Maybe I should go stay with him for a while…

I know you guys have been wondering about Anna too. I still haven't heard from her. It's been a while now, a week and a half... I'm starting to get worried. She won't answer her phone, her emails. There isn't even anyone there when I go knock on her door. This is getting distressing. What should I do?

-Ryan

Ryan Johnson (Fear_of)