Whirlwind

Have you ever had a day you were certain was a dream?

That has been today.

When I looked into the main room, I saw a man there.  I didn't recognize him.  He didn't see me, at first,  but I heard him call out.

"I gave you the warnings!  I left the codes!  You should have listened!  It's too late, now...it's too late for both of us!"

I waited until he was looking the other direction and slowly closed my door.  I turned towards my window and prepared to open it.

Then....I saw

I'm not sure what it is.  What it was.

It was shaped like a man.  It had wild, messy red hair, the sort of red no person's hair actually is.  It wore an oversized, blood-soaked shirt that covered its hands with over-long sleeves.  It must have had eyes, but I never remember seeing them.

I just remember its smile.

It was so wide, so impossibly wide.  Full of teeth, an impossible number of teeth, more than should have fit in an already impossibly wide smile.

And then it was in the room with me.

I scrambled to the door and flung it open, and tried to run, but the man in the room grabbed me, held me down no matter how hard I struggled against his grip.

"See, see what you're making me do!  It's your fault.  You should've run!"  The man cried and that...that thing walked slowly towards me.  The grin never left its face.  It only grew larger.

It knelt next to me.  Blood dripped off its shirt, onto the ground.  It held out a sleeve covered hand towards me, and I felt a cut slowly open across my  cheek, seemingly with no source.  I saw...I tried to look at its eyes, but I couldn't.  I could only see that horrible mouth, that horrible grin get wider and wider.

I realized it was going to torture me.  It was going to cut at me and bleed me and make me suffer.  And then it was going to take my heart.  It was going to kill me, and my baby, like it had killed Tam.

There was nothing I could do to stop it.

And that's when the man in white saved my life.

He burst in the room and stabbed the man holding me down in the chest with a butterfly knife.  The creature looked casually up at him, and the man in white wrenched the blade out of the man's body and slammed it into the monster's chest, right where the heart would have been on any human.

He then grabbed me and pulled me up, kicking away the now gasping for air man in the process, and pulled me as fast as he could us out of the building.

We had bolted out the front door and were starting to rush down the street when I realized that the "man" in white wasn't a man at all.

It was Erika.

Police cars pulled to a stop in front of us, and police  rushed out, pulling their weapons and ordering us to freeze.  Erika did so, as did I, mostly out of reflex.  I had no idea what was going on....I had no idea how I'd been saved, or what I'd been saved from.

I almost began to ask when the police in front of me were suddenly torn into ribbons by some invisible force.  From behind their cars stepped the creature, knife still protruding from its chest.  It walked slowly towards us.  Erika shoved me behind her and stepped forward, as if to meet it head on.

The thing cocked its head slightly, and reached both of its hands to the blade.   It pressed them to the weapon and slowly pulled it out without gripping it.  It then slowly held the knife out, as if offering it back.  Erika did not accept it, and the beast just let it topple to the ground.

It leaned to the side, and looked right at me.  Its grin somehow got even wider, now substantially wider than the face it belonged to, and then it vanished.

In its place was a bouquet of Forget-me-nots.

"Erika.  Erika, what was..."

"My name is not Erika."  She said.  "And we need to get you away from here, quickly.  You will live only as long as you provide decent sport for that--thing."

"But what's going on?!"  I asked.  "What was that?!  Who are you?!"

Erika--or whatever her name was--flipped her knife closed and placed it in her trenchcoat.  "I picked the name Erika because it is...similar to what I have been calling myself.  You should call me Extra.  The Extra Piece.  As for what that thing was...some call it the Smiling Man.  I try not to call these entities by their actual name.  I have thought of it, in the past, as the Where the Wild Roses Grow."

She has told me...substantially more, since we've been fleeing.  This is the only moment of respite I've known since the hellish whirlwind the day started as.

That..thing will follow me.  It will torment me until I stop being interesting to it, and then it will kill me.  All I can do to survive is...make it an interesting chase.

It is one of many, many creatures of its kind.  She won't tell me how she knows any of this, or why it didn't just kill her, too, when it had the chance.

We're at a diner.  Erika's--I cannot think of her otherwise--telling me we need to get moving, to find a place to sleep.  Before something comes and finds us.

I will post when I can.

Right now...I feel as though I need to sob myself to sleep.

Mary....Clayre...don't worry about me.  I think...I think I'll be fine, for now.  I think we'll be fine.

Greetings from protective custody

There is nothing quite like being woken the day after your fiance has been found dead in your very own place of residence by the police.

To answer any questions, I am fine, for the moment.  Though, perhaps, a better way to say that is I am numb, for the moment.  I feel cold, cold and empty.  It will probably pass in time, but for now, I feel nothing. Clayre, Erika, and Mary all worry for me, but they shouldn't.  This has wounded me, it has cut me  very deeply, but I will survive, and I will scar over, and I will be a better person for this.

I have almost repeated that enough that I believe it.

At any rate, you have probably gained additional questions due to my rather attention-gathering post title.  I had thought of perhaps doing something a bit less gaudy, but in the end, I went with shock value.  Gauche, I know.

I am being held by the police, for my own good.

Apparently, the death of Tam, coupled with the lead-up to his murder, follow the pattern of a serial killer known as "the Chrysanthemum Slasher".  Given the pattern of the Slasher, either I, someone Tam knows, or someone I know could be the next victims.  So, I have police watching my movements at all hours of the night.  Clayre and Mary and Erika have been staying with me at a house where we can all be watched carefully "for our own protection".

...and I honestly do not care if I am next.

I know that sounds terrible.  I just do not care anymore.  It's not that I don't want to live anymore.  I just don't care if I die.

Yes, I know this means the baby would die too, but...I feel like a horrible person, but I have a hard time caring about that either.  You didn't see what his body looked like.  The pain he must have gone through.  he must have been so scared, so alone.  The killer took his heart.  He took my Tam's heart.  Why would someone do that to someone else?  What sort of world am I bringing this child into, where someone will do that to another human being?