Talk:Penpal/@comment-35503149-20180505234448/@comment-4533241-20180507112902

Something tells me the empty bottle of ether they found in the coffin was important... like if the guy hadn't drank it before he laid down on top of Josh, Josh might've been able to move him once he bled out.

Like Josh had the right idea killing him – ether is an anesthetic so technically the guy was only unconscious and could have woken up if he drank too little (what a coward; he makes sure and puts himself to sleep so he can die peacefully, but leaves his victim, Josh, awake to suffer every moment); but I think since the stalker was big his body was heavy to begin with and that, combined with the fact that his body was essentially made into a meat sack by the ether, plus the fact that Josh (possibly) had experienced limited physical movements and range of motion for 2-3 years, made moving the guy just out of the realm of possibility for Josh. All of this essentially means that all he could do was kick and scream for 12 hours (imagine the terror and actual physical agony of both needing to be heard from a box underneath dirt and being buried alive; each scream takes up an even bigger remainder of your air supply) and hope that MAYBE someone heard him. According to the novel, the coffin was pretty big, too (4ft wide, 7ft long, I measured it with a tape measure to confirm how spacious that is), so it's not like Josh with his smaller size would've lacked the space to get around him – that is, IF he were just able to push free.

But as for the ether, I'm not really sure if it actually was important in that way or not. It was probably more to establish the stalker's twisted sense of romanticism and also to show how weak he was mentally and emotionally.

tl;dr: Great Scott, I think you're right

Also something your comment helped me realize again, that I had forgotten: Josh's single comment, "You left," was probably in reference to the fact that the author's mom moved herself and the author to another neighborhood after realizing that not only was her son was being stalked/messed with by a dangerous and untrackable man, but that the stalker was literally sleeping underneath their house in the crawlspace, and when the stalker couldn't figure out where they moved to (for some strange reason; perhaps they left too suddenly for him to realize, or more likely because he didn't have a car available to him at the time and couldn't follow them), he decided to start messing with Josh since he knew where HE lived and they looked similar (also Josh and the author were extremely close to put it lightly, so there's that), and eventually kidnapped him out of despair and panic because he couldn't find the author. His motivations also seemed markedly more spiteful and anger-driven from this point on in the story; after the author moved but before Josh was kidnapped, Josh was at least marginally aware of what was happening almost every night and why due to the events of "Boxes," and bada boom bada bing, we have one traumatized child and one irreversible and downright horrible chain of events. And then fast forward and in addition to going through the unthinkable for two years, Josh has all of this confirmed when he gets dragged along with the stalker and "probably" witnesses his own sister being run down.

It's all so messed up.