- Name: Samantha Hill
- Pronouns: She/her
- Date: March 19, 2020
- Occupation: Mystery author
- City of residence: Chicago, Illinois
- Date(s) of account: September 2019
- Subject of account: A gift of a lighter
Account
My name is Samantha Hill. You might know me as a mystery author. (Or you might not. My stories have never been very popular, if I'm being honest with myself.)
It started six months ago. I was listening to music in my living room when I heard someone knock at the door. I got up to answer it, but there was nobody there. I assumed someone was playing ding-dong ditch. When I glanced down, I saw there was a lighter on the ground. My visitor must have left it on the doorstep before knocking and running away.
I picked up the lighter and turned it around, but I didn't see anything odd about it. It just looked like a silver flick lighter. It was a bit like one I lost a few years ago, although that one had an eye design on it. I shrugged, put it in my desk drawer, and forgot about it.
That lasted a little while.
Five months ago, I was listening to music again when I noticed something odd in the song playing though the speakers. I wasn't able to quite make it out at first. As I moved closer to the nearest speaker, I realized it was the sound of a wolf growling.
That was when everything went wrong. After that day, I constantly got the feeling I was being watched. No matter what I did, it was impossible to shake that feeling. I wasn't able to concentrate on anything else. I would try to work on the outline for my next book, a novel about arson that had been inspired by the lighter I'd been given, but it was too much. I couldn't think of anything but the feeling that something was staring at me, knowing everything I did.
I started to lose sleep.
Things just got worse from there. The loss of rest made it harder to rationalize the feeling as simple paranoia, and the further I succumbed to my fear, the harder it got to ignore the feeling and go to sleep. I became convinced that if I slipped from my vigilance for even a moment, whatever was watching me would be able to strike. But the more sleep I lost, the more my waking and sleeping began to blend together. I would experience things that seemed like dreams even while I was awake, seeing eyes on the walls, hearing growls through the sounds of static on my old TV.
One day, I was brought on air to discuss my upcoming book, which, by this point, I had decided to call Burnout. I was too sleep-deprived to have the backbone to refuse, though I was terrified of being asked questions about it, given how little progress I'd made since I first started to feel like I was being watched.
However, the host didn't ask any questions about the book. Instead, he asked me if I was happy with myself. I asked him to repeat himself, and again, he asked if I was happy with what I'd done with my life, asking if I remembered April 19, 2002. I asked what he meant. He asked if I was happy.
I have a confession to make here.
I don't know if you have to report me for this or what, but April 19, 2002 is the day I burned down my own home. It was insurance fraud. Actually, that's what first got me interested in the mystery genre, although I knew it would be too obvious if I wrote a story about arson right after my house burned down.
I told him that, no, I wasn't happy. He laughed and thanked me for being available. I hung up and tried to go to sleep.
For the first time in nearly a week, I managed to get some sleep that night. But it wasn't restful. I had a dream that I was being chased through a foggy moor by a huge black wolf with hundreds of eyes. The exhaustion caught up with me, and I stopped to breathe, but the wolf wasn't tired. It stalked forward and jumped on me, pinning me to the ground. It bit and tore and clawed at me until I was a skeletal husk.
The wolf dragged the coat from my lifeless form and onto the barren ground. It tore open the pocket to reveal a silver lighter, the same lighter that was in my desk. The same lighter, the eye design long since faded, that it had taken from the charred remains of my home.
The wolf didn't do anything after that. It didn't have to. My flesh started to burn, and I woke up.
Analysis
Well, that was certainly something.
From the digging Alex has done for me while I was busy, the home of one Samantha Hill did burn down April 19, 2002, the same Samantha Hill who later had a breakdown while discussing her upcoming mystery novel Burnout on air.
The host, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not ask Hill if she was happy, nor did he bring up the date on which her home burned down. In actuality, he asked how she was doing. When he was met with silence, he tried to check that she was still there, to which she responded after several seconds with crying and ranting about how she "confessed." She hung up the phone before he could ask if she was okay.
As far as both Alex and I are concerned, there aren't enough details that we can confirm or deny for this account to be conclusive one way or another. We'll keep our eyes peeled for any further developments.
No comments:
Post a Comment